I am going to England this summer. It will be my first time outside of the United States—my mom and I will fly out of Georgia over the Atlantic Ocean together, both giddy and terrified. She will grip my hand hard if there is turbulence, and I will comfort her while secretly losing it. In preparation, still about a month or two out, we are securing all the “TSA Pre-Check” programs under the sun, and I have an interview with the government in Boston next week. Over spring break, she hands me my passport, and I thumb through its pages to my photo. I am 16, wearing a bright orange sweater and sporting a deep side part. My hair is a darker brown than it is now, and I remember I had just dyed over the several blonde highlights I had rocked since 14, awkwardly caught between trying to blend with the Southern beauty queens and establishing my individuality. It was good riddance—I had never really liked being blonde. I had just started filling my eyebrows in; they are bold and uneven. There is a string of pearls around my neck—a 2020 microtrend. I remember watching Harry Styles' music videos with my friends at the time and liking the aesthetic of his pearls, though I looked more like a grandma in them. It feels humiliating to say these things now, with 2020 trends so freshly uncool, but I find myself struck by this image of teenage me, the roots of myself as I know her now just sprouting into the light. Lately, I have thought a lot about then and about being 16.
A few days after my sophomore year of high school essentially ended, when the pandemic began in full throttle, I stayed up until midnight and waited for Animal Crossing: New Horizons to drop. Having been raised on Animal Crossing: New Leaf, the 3DS version, I was at the front of that trend. During that first week of lockdown, I averaged around seven hours of Animal Crossing a day. It was madness, but I was ecstatic. I’d hop in the car, freshly licensed, scream my favorite song(s) on the five-minute drive to the Mexican restaurant in my neighborhood, inhale two soft tacos, and then log onto the Animal Crossing turnip stock market on my computer. In the evenings, I would go on a two-hour bike ride and put on Frank Ocean’s Blonde, an album I had recently discovered—probably from some Rolling Stone “Best Albums of the Decade” list I saw on Twitter—and gleefully circle my empty high school to “Pink + White.” It was picturesque, and it was wonderful. In those moments, I was 16 and alone and without a care in the world.
I cut my hair short that summer and went to the beach. There, I discovered the song “Liability” by Lorde, which led to my discovery of the album Melodrama, which led to an obsession so intense and passionate that I now honor the album with a spot on my bedroom wall. I watched every YouTube video I could find of the Melodrama tour and decided I would be the next Jack Antonoff: the producer for Lorde, not to mention Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, Clairo, and St. Vincent. I went cliff-jumping with my friends and, after we accidentally passed through a Trump boat rally on the way there, thought about how I was pro-choice and hated Trump and felt disgusted by my hometown’s political attitude. I liked long drives and the way the Georgia golden hour light hit the summer leaves and the heat lightning flashing through the orange evening sky and the Mitski song about it. I wore sweaters and corduroys and T-shirts and my brand-new Doc Martens loafers. I jumped at the chance to go shopping in Atlanta and imagined myself as a city girl.
Driven by my newfound independence, I decided I wanted to go to a school called Brown because it sounded smart and far away, and I liked the idea of an “Open Curriculum.” I watched student vlogs on YouTube and felt my chest burn with excitement—the anxiety was yet to come. During my junior and senior years, I would have to close my laptop at any mention of Brown lest I feel sick. I took AP BC Calculus my junior year and studied manically for the exam to “Roman Holiday” by Nicki Minaj. I surprised myself by getting into a prestigious summer camp. On the way there, we stopped in Atlanta and stayed in a hotel across from a high-rise in midtown. I watched a small house party through the huge windows as I fell asleep and thought about how promising my future could be.
At 16, I was the happiest I had ever been, and again, at 20, I feel the happiest I have ever been. Maybe that is why I have been thinking about being 16 so much—a strange nostalgia for a blanket feeling you once felt and are now feeling again, like when you listen to an old song you loved and remember the past events with which it was associated. If I took my passport photo again today, I’d have dark hair, but with bangs now, and my eyebrows would be filled in better. No pearls, but I’d still probably be wearing a sweater. If 16 is hope, then 20 is its realization. Funny how those adolescent hopes and interests have hardly changed. I just declared my political science major and have taken several music theory and production classes at Brown. I still seize any chance for adventure, whether it be cliff-jumping at Clarks Hill Lake or snowboarding in Vermont. I take solo road trips to see my friends in college across the state. Funnily enough, I will even see Nicki Minaj in concert next Monday.
There’s a Lorde lyric (I would know)—“all the music you loved at sixteen, you'll grow out of”—and I wonder if it is true. I think about my Mom’s love for Tom Petty and The Outsiders and think maybe not. 16 is a special year of self-actualization that we struggle to fully let go of. It doesn’t matter if it has been four years or 41. I think about 20’s relation to 16 as two years carefully balanced on the center of a seesaw towards a concrete end—in my case, graduating high school and graduating college. I draw the comparison between 16 and 20 as times when I have both been happy in my reality and desperately hopeful for the future—and consequently as times when I have been most moldable by the media I consume. Yet 16, as the first time, will always be special.
On a spring break trip to Cape May, my friends and I cook dinner together and then gather on the couch. Somebody suggests we watch music videos. I take the remote and put on Lorde’s “Perfect Places,” a vibrant anthem about youth and self-exploration. Amidst spliced together shots of her at 19 wearing couture dresses on the beach, she dances alone with a lightbulb, swinging by a cord from the ceiling. I think about the first time I watched it, thinking she was so cool in my bedroom at 16, and now, suddenly older than her, at 20. When it's over, I tell my friends it's my favorite music video, and I think it might always be.
