Despacito

It was early August 2018, and, like many evenings that year, I was passing the time at my girlfriend’s house. My pearl white, sticker-covered Subaru Outback, coated in grime and dust, stood out front on the circular driveway; flowers, vines, and tree branches reflected on the windshield. My girlfriend and I were up in the treehouse, which was nestled in a great oak all the way at the back of her rectangular-shaped backyard. It was a massive yard, and in the dim twilight, from our vantage point up in the oak, her house was just a vague dark mass in the distance, hiding behind a web of crisscrossing boughs. A high wrought iron fence traced all the way around the yard, sometimes sharing the space with thick bushes, lush and green in midsummer. To me, it felt like the safest place on earth. There could be God knows what happening out in the world, but here, in this haven, in this summer paradise, nothing could touch us.

We lay on the rough wood boards and talked and laughed and shared memes as the sky grew dark, cicadas and crickets purring rhythmically in the sonic background. She and I spent a lot of time sharing memes. My high school years were the golden age of the meme. Back around 2017-2018, was when Instagram was overflowing with the surreal, meaningless, nihilistic humor our generation seems to love so much. I ended up unfollowing most of those pages after they started posting political propaganda alongside the memes, and these days, that humor just doesn’t pack the punch it used to. Back then the popular rap music of the time didn’t bore me to death, back then Donald Trump being president was still kind of funny, back then taking in the constant flow of pop culture news felt like nonstop entertainment instead of a soul-sucking exercise to be avoided at all costs. The world was a bigger, friendlier place, a place dying to be explored, to be understood—a place, it seemed to me, not yet exhausted by its inhabitants.

If you didn’t post online about whatever fun and/or cute activity you were doing with your significant other, did it even happen? In my Snapchat memories, there’s a selfie of us, me in a red bro-tank, her in a gray gymnastics t-shirt. On her VSCO, there’s a short, two-second video that plays on a loop. We say cheese for the camera, and she holds a Scheels water bottle in her hand. I had the typical high school boy haircut of the era, with the sides buzzed and faded and the comb-over on top. Hers was light brown and longer than most girls’ hair.

“So, let’s, like, talk. Like, actually talk.”

She chuckled. “About what?”

I was the one who dominated most of our conversations. That wasn’t because she was a particularly quiet person, though. I just tend to talk people’s ears’ off when I really get going. Sometimes I feel bad about past conversations. Do I do it because I’m an egomaniac or just because I’m bursting with enthusiasm? Maybe one day I’ll know. “About, like, the future. What do you wanna be when you grow up? You’re gonna be a doctor, right?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“I’ll never understand you smarty pants math and science kids. Like, that stuff just makes no sense to me. It’s just so hard for me, that stuff.”

“I thought you wanted to do the same, though. I thought you wanted to do pre-med.”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

She eyed me curiously. “What are you thinking?”

I put my arm around her shoulders. “I don’t know, I just hate school, man. I’m not as naturally good at it as people like you.”

She groaned. I often would mention how much of a better student she was than me, as if I were proud of it. Maybe I was. It helped me feel unique in a way, knowing that I wasn’t like most honors kids, knowing that instead of putting my head down and doing the work, I would play the class clown all semester, bomb the mid-term, and then study my ass off for the final and nail an A- on it, pulling me from a 78.8% to the coveted 80%. In high school, a person would have been hard-pressed to find anyone as proud of their B-minuses as me.

“You’re smart, Ethan. If you just applied….”

“Apply shmy. I hate studying and stuff.”

She laughed. “Well, what do you want to do, then?” Her face was inches from mine, and her deep blue eyes glittered dangerously in the dusk.

I grinned sheepishly. “I wanna be a rapper.” Laughing in spite of myself, I continued. “I mean, like, for real though. I actually wanna be a rapper.”

Her response was succinct. “Well, be one then!”

I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, okay, I’ll get on it. What kind of doctor do you wanna be, though?”

An almost serious look flitted across her face. Sometimes she would get weirdly serious like that when she was talking about medicine, as if there were suddenly patients dying on her in an adjacent room. “I don’t know yet.”

“No idea?”

“I don’t know, I guess I just haven’t given it much thought.”

“Well, once my rap career doesn’t work out, I expect you’ll be bringing home the bacon for us.” 

I leaned forward and kissed her, and she kissed me back. We sat there a second, criss-cross-applesauce in the treehouse, lips adjoined, and then she pulled away.

“I just thought of one you’ll like.”

I can’t be sure of what kind of phone she had back then. I think it was a rose gold iPhone 7. What I can be sure I remember, though, is that I was jealous as a bitch. My piss-yellow iPhone 5C, bought off my aunt for fifty dollars, could hardly run a fucking YouTube video. The funny thing is how much I miss that old piece of junk now. I bought an expensive, smooth-as-a-dream 8 several months later when the cracks in our relationship started to show. Obviously that’s a stupid, humorous stretch of a coincidence, but I’m not entirely joking; there are a lot of good memories I can associate with that phone.

She went into her saved Instagram posts and scrolled for a second, finding the meme in question. “Alexa, play my favorite song…” read the caption. Underneath that were stock images of a desk, a paw, and a Cheeto.

I facepalmed and shook my head. She laughed a clear, wild laugh, and I embraced her. We kissed again.

The goodbyes between the two of us were always predictably drawn out, over-dramatic, and cute. In accordance with completing eleventh grade and thus becoming a twelfth grader, my curfew had moved up an hour, to midnight, and as the witching hours began, our growing desires were at odds with the evil overlords (my parents) that wanted me home. I won’t even mention her parents, who slept just feet from her bedroom, undoubtedly listening closely for whatever suspicious sounds might escape the crack under her door.

“Text me when you get home.”

We kissed. “I was gonna text you anyway, baby.”

“It’s just a thing I say.”

“I love it. Don’t ever stop saying it.”

We kissed a few more times.

“You need to go. If you left twenty minutes ago, you’d have still been late.” As it was, I was on track to be about thirty minutes late. Legally speaking, it was maybe a thirteen-minute drive back to my house, but late at night with no one on the roads, I could make it a hell of a lot quicker than that. To this day, I thank God those stoplight cameras apparently don’t get checked.

I walked out onto the porch and looked over my shoulder. The door was cracked, and her ocean eyes peered through the gap. “I love you.”

“I love you too.”

I walked to my car, pressed play on some old Kali Uchis demos from Soundcloud, and began to drive home. Deep in the night, driving through the older part of Billings past the grand, pillared houses, I could, and still can, play pretend, like I’m driving an old 1930’s Cadillac down rainy cobblestone streets in London or Paris, leaving my lover’s penthouse apartment after a sensual night of drinking Cognac and listening to songs like “Buffalo Gals” on a phonograph. Driving home those many nights, the smell of her perfume on my shirt sleeves, I felt like a real, proper grown-up, someone wonderfully mysterious and handsome and romantic, someone neglecting their oh-so-important duties to spend the evenings with their beautiful lover.

But did I ever actually love her? If so, wouldn’t I still, deep down? Do I even miss her, or do I just miss that time in my life? Sometimes it feels like we were just dumb kids pretending to be in love, playing the endlessly cliched roles of the high school power couple, John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John sharing milkshakes and wearing letterman jackets and making out in backseats. Other times it feels like it was something deeper and more real, something that lasted well over a year, longer than most high schoolers’ flings, something that could have continued on forever. Why did we even break up? I always tell people there were “lots of reasons,” but I can hardly remember them now. They must have not been that important, right? Then again, maybe they were—they split us up, after all.

Look, I’ve moved on, and I’m sure she has too, but bear with me, reader. We all get nostalgic sometimes. There are songs and smells and streets that occasionally I take detours down. Depending on the weather, the season, the time of day, or whatever chemical imbalances inhabit my brain at the given time, the memories can be stronger or weaker. The weaker go-arounds, I move on with my day. The stronger go-arounds, I get inspired, and make an effort to record my thoughts in some way.

That night was just like many others. I drove home and texted her for a little while, and then went to bed. My retelling probably isn’t even very accurate, more a conglomeration of many nights. All those nights together, though, make up a patchwork of flash-in-the-pan memories, snapshots in my head that are just clear enough to make out the general idea and just blurry enough to obscure any details, a grainy home video that crackles with cheap nostalgia but holds its true contents at arm’s length, just out of reach of a mind that wants to understand. Only two years later, these memories have already been manipulated and rose-tinted a fair degree, I would guess, so who can say how different they will be in two more, or in ten more? 

Indie rocker Jonathan Richman once wrote, “You pick these things apart and they’re not that appealing/You put them together and you’ll get this certain feeling,”¹ referring to our tendency to idealize the good old days. Were our conversations actually witty and cute, or mostly small talk about classes and sports with occasional artificial and forced depth? Did we actually spend all those summer nights in her treehouse and in her backyard or did we spend most of our time in the basement watching Netflix? Was I actually head over heels for her, or did I do a lot of fantasizing about other girls and whining to my friends about how she didn’t have to pay for lift tickets with her own money? I know the truth about these times, but I’m not sure if I’m fully ready to face it. In the meantime, these memories are a safe place I can go, a place that, the more I think about it, probably didn’t really exist. After all, if all that was so special, why did she and I give it up?

I pulled up to my house, hitting the curb as I always did, and looked up from the road. There, sitting stoically on the street corner, the porch light surrounded by whirring mayflies and midges, was the Wilson home. The sidewalks were wet and glistening from the sprinklers, which had just finished their routine. Stars twinkled above, a heavenly host watching over all of us.

I unlocked the door as quietly as I could and crept inside. The house was silent and dark, my family asleep. Hanging my keys, I tiptoed downstairs and typed in my iPhone code, the spell of the night broken.

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1. Jonathan Richman, “That Summer Feeling,” I, Jonathan, Rounder Records, 1992.