No Longer Sixteen...and Candles

I have a candle that I think almost every girl my age probably owns. It’s this Leaves candle from Bath and Bodyworks and it smells incredible. It smells like campfires, wearing a boy’s jacket, and apple cider if that makes sense. It will always smell incredible but the smell it has is so deeply rooted with scent memories that fill me with joy and embarrassment. It’s funny too, because when I smell it I have these memories that are connected to a soundtrack of this time and place, and when I hear that soundtrack I can smell this candle. It is a cycle of teenage memories.

My 1998 Toyota Camry drove me around my hometown and was always bumping with music. I listened to everything either on burnt CDs or off my phone that I connected to a tape that went into the cassette player. If you remember those tapes that acted as aux cords, that you could only buy at RadioShack I applaud you. Anyway, that car was my chariot senior year. I drove it everywhere, and never let the stereo turn off. The Lumineers had just come out with a new album in the fall of 2012 that was in the rotation, Arcade Fire, and Foster the People were also favorites. Pretty much anything that was played in Urban Outfitters around this time was probably playing in my car. For those reading this who are much younger than me, Urban Outfitters was a very cool place to shop when I was in high school. 

During that fall, the fall of 2012, I would often light that Leaves candle while I did my homework. I would do my homework as soon as I got home, which would either be right after school if I was lucky, or 10 pm when I finally got home from rehearsals. Either way, I’d sit at my dad’s old desk from the 60’s and do my work, the candle and the same music I played in the car kept me company. I also read my favorite book of all time while that candle burned, sometimes instead of doing my homework, it was and is The Perks of Being a Wallflower. 

I have probably read The Perks of Being a Wallflower at least 20 times. It is written in letter format and dated on the top of each letter, so I often will pick it up and flip open to a letter closest to that day's date and just read that. It’s like talking to an old, old friend. I found this book actually because it came out as a movie that very same fall. Now, before I go any further I will admit something that people either really agree with or find just insane- I like movie trailers more than movies. 

This is something I actually don’t like about myself because I feel like this makes me the type of person who has no actual artistic sense and that scares me. But, I love how trailers make me feel. They’re so conveying and have such good music that aligns with how you feel in the moments clipped together. To be honest, if I could do anything in my life it would be making movie trailers but I don’t think that is a very easy industry to get into and my skills with film production are not as good as with the written word. I often find books by searching if a movie is based on a book after watching the trailer. 

Back to Perks though, it was the first book I ever read that made me feel so understood not because of the plot but because of the character’s perception of the world. I began to embrace that type of perception that was so very innate in my personality. I also fell in love with the 90’s which if you know me in real life you know how much of an influence that had on my life, and yes I remember the 90s please don’t millennial shame me. This period of time was very much my coming of age in that I fully realized that I was different and that needed to be explored. 
I explored it at DePaul University briefly. I encountered my artistic side very much during this time. I took writing courses with famous authors and began to see the depth of things that were surface level to me before. I became a pseudo-hipster and wrote terrible poetry in the best coffee shop in the world (The Bourgeois Pig). It was the Ebb of my individuality, and the flow came later, in more recent times specifically. I have come back to my more down to earth self with the same perception and artistic desires and a flushed out grasp on my personality. 

Here’s the thing though, now that I am this person I am back in my hometown and around people I once knew, who know a very different me. It is incredibly uncomfortable at times as your interactions with those old acquaintances bring back the person that you no longer are. Then you realize that they are no longer who they were either. You are two new people meeting again, as old friends. You may be the person who ran into a fence in 4th grade and was a little boy crazed in high school that didn’t have a filter, (i.e. me) but you’re not now.  What I just wrote is incredibly cliche, believe me, I know you've heard that before, probably from your mom, it had to be reiterated though. However, if you're in your hometown take in the things that acted as the catalyst for the change in your individuality. Those things are probably around your hometown somewhere, or maybe in the person that makes you revert back ever so slightly to who you were. For me when that Leaves Candlewick is lit, or The Smith Westerns come on my Spotify, or even if I spot a 1998 Toyota Camry in sandy gold I feel that chemical reaction that led me to become me and I remember just how freeing that explosion of character was.