Those Teenage Years (Ally Sheedy was right)

And I can tell you my love for you will still be strong
After the boys of summer have gone

Don Henley

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I swear it was playing somewhere inside me - so deep I could hear it - as I drove back to the city, the day after your funeral.

Yesterday they said you were gone.

But we looked at you. 
Your flesh now ashes. 
Your heart now words 
in a journal you held in 
your hands. 
Your spirit in fresh henna in the flesh on mine.

I can’t remember if they touched.

Your spirit in the ink made with a pen you gripped with the courage it takes to declare something.

I don’t believe them Jeff.

You never believed them, and neither did I.

And Greg he writes letters and burns his CDs
They say you were something in those formative years
Hold onto nothing as fast as you can

Tori Amos, Pretty Good Year
(Under the Pink, 1994)

Breakfast Club was a staple. One line hit hard when we were kids. We shouted in silence to each other, watching one of the most powerful movies of Gen X: They just don’t get it, they just don’t understand what really matters!

Now, grown up, it still means so much…

When you grow up your heart dies.

Breakfast Club

…but in a completely different way.

I was still living in that apartment, Jeff. 
Do you remember it? 
I hated that place.

Did you come to say goodbye that Thursday?
Did the noise in my head drown you out?

Out on the road today, I saw a DEADHEAD sticker on a Cadillac
A little voice inside my head said, “Don’t look back. You can never look back”
I thought I knew what love was
What did I know?
Those days are gone forever
I should just let them go but-

Don Henley