I like a good ode. It feels figuratively like setting up an altar in words for that experience, that object, that feeling, that point in time.
In my head, fifteen holds a canonical mythos. A time that marks a departure from childhood. When friendship is so rich and so essential that you write letters, share a journal, decorate lockers for birthdays and cry viscously when someone moves away. When crushes are sacred and embarrassing. A hug in the hallway will have you careening the whole day. Fifteen is stepping away from the group in the park so your best friend can tell you what sex is like. You put all of this information together after, this once adult world of sex and desire. You sort it out diligently at night before you fall asleep. What you’ve heard, what you’ve seen in movies, what you’ve read and you imagine it for yourself. You pray that someone will want you this much.
At fifteen me and all my friends were masters at weaving stories, imbuing meaning into everything. I was living in Shanghai and I was at that critical time where new found freedom and a wide open city collided. So early on in our lives we had this pressing feeling that time was running out, and all of us were determined to make the most of a Tuesday afternoon, climbing to the roof of a clocktower building to have a picnic, or the rooftop of the Marriot, or stealing the family moped before my parents came home from work, so we could drive around the congested streets weaving around cars. We would collect experiences like tokens, marveling at the fact that we were main characters of our own stories. We would get in trouble just to recite the story the next day on the bus about how we were in a low speed chase with guards of a gated community, them on bicycles us on mopeds, or how we accidentally paid someone to kick down the side door of a music festival so we could run in without bracelets. My friend would display the gash she received on her shin from tripping over the barricade proudly like a battle scar.
We were brought up riding the coattails of the Indie Sleaze movement delivered to us through Tumblr and Skins. We idolized the image of youth they sold us. We measured ourselves against waif-like figures wielding cigarettes with scrapes on their knees. We wanted to be as brutally real and honest as these images. Everything was referential to these symbols, through them we curated our experiences and yet in doing so we produced something all our own, something close to the real.
My friend's parents rarely cared where we were or if we left to go out at 10, 11, 12PM, but we climbed out the window anyway or sneaked out the door just to hold that image in our mind that we were revolting against some unseen force. Without an enforced drinking age, we would go to the convenience store and buy Chinese liquor that tastes like nail polish varnish and chase it with iced tea. We would go to the bar that was exclusively filled with highschool students and some as young as thirteen or twelve and buy shots that were essentially watered down tequila, 10 yuan a piece. I felt so impossibly cool, and less so when periodically I would have to step out to call my mom so she could confirm that I was actually at a sleepover and not doing exactly what I was doing. We would pool all of our cash together and take a taxi home with the windows down, the wind gushing in as we flew down the highway, playing music off one of our phones. At those bars you could still smoke inside and on the evenings that I would come back home I would douse myself in a Hollister body spray thinly disguising the smell of smoke that reeked in my hair.
We tried on eating disorders, depression, cutting. We were all brutally honest about this as well. My friend would display her collection of box blades and I would nod knowingly even when it shocked me. This level of intimacy could not be replicated, but it was these moments most of all that the lines were blurred between these images on Tumblr and the real feelings of angst and isolation we all felt. This level of suffering had an aura of worldliness that was its own cultural cache like skinniness or sexual experience that at times felt close to godliness. Everything was a secret to share with your friends in a quiet moment on the top of your apartment's roof under the one lone star in the sky, all the rest drowned out by light pollution. In these ways, it was worth it to suffer like this just so you could reveal it to another.
I use ‘we’ so often because so much of the magic was the communal experience that was taking place. At that age the best feeling in the entire world was being a part of something and having an experience with the people you loved. My friends were playing games with their hearts and their bodies that they hardly had words for then, but it all felt rich and urgent. The truth was I was more of a reserved kid. Amongst all the expressions of rebellion I was surrounded by I myself rarely got drunk, I never had sex or kissed anyone. I was desperately inexperienced and continually trying to disguise this fact. I would nod along when my friends recounted their first sexual experiences wanting so desperately to be touched, but seemingly unable to translate that desire beyond the bounds of my own mind.
I would look back on this period for many years to come. I spent a long time mourning the brief and bright star it was, when just six months after my fifteenth birthday my family moved back to Canada. It is incredible the relativity of time at that age. What had coalesced over a short one year span from fourteen to fifteen felt like an entire lifetime. It felt like experimenting with death, having the most beautiful and challenging experience and watching it all get taken away like it was never there. I would try to relate to my peers who had grown up their whole lives in the suburbs, whose idea of fun on a Saturday was going to the mall and then maybe to the movies, but I felt miserable and resentful. I felt cheated, robbed and humiliated when I had to ask my parents to drive me anywhere. I was in many ways experiencing the first of many grief cycles. I made little friends my first year in Canada, but naturally as the dust settled I adapted to the new circumstances begrudgingly and carried on with it.
Now, I am closer to thirty than I am to fifteen. I don’t quite know what to do with this. I’ve been feeling more like an adult lately, and in this way it feels more and more important to connect to the fire I had at fifteen and all of the fundamental truths about myself then that remain true now. My longtime best friend from that time came to visit in January, taking the overnight bus from New York to Montreal. The same one who made a whole moment of telling me I was her best friend like she was saying I love you for the first time or asking for my hand in marriage. The same one that I still hold hands with. We were talking in my kitchen and I asked her what were the things that have changed about me since then and what has remained the same.
She said, “You’ve always had this dreamy way of looking at life, kind of romantic. You want a lot out of life, but now you seem more at ease. Not pressured by the weight of those things like you were before.”
It’s good to have someone who has known all the iterations of yourself.
I have always had a deep and aching desire for life to be more than the sum of its parts. With the city and friendship as my medium, I crafted moments and stories where everything felt rich and deeply alive. I will never forget the magic of staying out all night just to watch the feeble smoggy sunrise at The Bund in our crop tops and tiny skirts. When friendship was enduring and living was more than enough.
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Next podcast will be up by the end of the month <3 It’s on I Love Dick by Chris Kraus and the autofiction turn. (ooooh ahhh). More on life being a story-telling tool…
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Kisses
-Thai xx