Been thinking lately about the relative coolness of teenagers, which is a weird thing to say, so I’ll elaborate: teens sometimes rock up in my discord server and stay for years and become adults. This only occurs if they survive the filter of “didn’t get banned for irritating me”, and I’m surprised how often that happens, and by how cool some of them are – way cooler and smarter (I tend to think) than I or anyone I knew was at that age. I’m also reading the Prince of Persia diaries by Jordan Mechner, where despite being 20, the guy writes plenty of smart things, miles smarter than I remember being capable of at that age. It has me reexamining, a little bit, the impression I have of my own presumed-cringey adolescence. If cool teens are possible, was I one, at least sometimes? I didn’t keep a diary, I can’t check.
It called to mind an anecdote, though, because it’s proof that I knew at least one cool teen: the time I was apologised to via mysterious Call to Adventure.
I started at my high school in year 9, and I started out feeling pretty alienated, because not only was I pretty undersocialised on account of being homeschooled for a few years, this wasn’t just a highschool; it went all the way from kindy to year 12, so a lot of these kids had known each other their whole lives. I was weird at my old schools, and now I had extra disadvantages! Anyway, long story short, there was some bullying for a while, nothing extreme. By year 11 I was getting on great with everybody.
Before that, though, and from the start, I was getting the same bus as a girl who I thought seemed cool, so I tried to talk to her once, but she ignored me flat-out. For probably three years she was blanking me or glaring at me or telling me to fuck off, just generally being a bit of an arsehole. It wasn’t my whole day, but it was a bummer.
Anyway, one day I find in my letterbox a mysterious postcard. It’s got an eye on it, and it says “Wᴀʟᴋ ᴛᴏ ᴛʜᴇ ᴛʀᴀɪɴ sᴛᴀᴛɪᴏɴ. A ᴍᴇssᴀɢᴇ ʀᴇᴏ̨ᴜᴇsᴛs ʏᴏᴜʀ ɢᴀᴢᴇ.” and then “Lᴏᴏᴋ Fᴏʀ Gᴏʟᴅ“. What the fuck?
So I walk to the train station, which is disused; I guess the Byron Shire Council reckons it’s not worth running trains between the towns in that area so there’s no public transport at all, just a bunch of derelict stations. I look for gold for a while, wondering how literally to take that, and finally, on the side of the platform, where you’d get hit by a train if there was one, I see this:
Well, not this. This is what it looks like now. I don’t have a picture of the whole thing anymore. But stencilled on the platform in gold paint is something like: “Joe, I was rude to you and you didn’t deserve it. I’m sorry.” And a picture of Audrey Hepburn.
You can still sorta see the “I’m sorry”:
Unfortunately this didn’t really narrow it down, so I had no idea who it was from until she came and asked me a few days later if I got her postcard, at which point I freaked out, and we were friends after that – better friends than most, I thought, though we didn’t keep in touch much after school. I forgot about it for many years, but remembered a couple years ago when I was in town, and went back and got these pictures, which I sent to her. She’s cringey about her teen self too! I said mate, you were the coolest teen ever made. An unsolicited apology for behaviour you examined on your own, unprompted, delivered in a sick, creative, illegal way? You were 16! Anyone I tell about this is blown away.
I often talk to folks who have a properly hard time thinking about their much-younger self. I mostly don’t, myself – you have to let yourself off the hook for old shit, times before you were equipped to do better. You can’t always, and I tend, still, to think of earlier versions of myself as horrible. But although I was often ignorant, or tactless or mean or reactive – the ways I had been shown how to be – I was never bigoted or hateful or wrathful, and I always wanted to be kind. It takes long time to realise these things. I’ve apologised to people for stuff they don’t remember and accepted apologies for deeply-regretted stuff that never bothered me, and when someone says I made a good impression back then, I usually just wonder how much attention they can have been paying. But maybe plenty. Kids are just kids, man.
Anyway, yeah. Coolest apology I ever got.
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