It's raining on prom night

god, i thought, i forgot about the stars up here. perhaps i was too busy learning how to drive along the road to my girlfriends' houses during high school, and too teenage-drunk on the way home to look up. now i am twenty-one years old, driving by myself in a car that is mine, and ignoring its desperate pleas for coolant and oil i lean over the steering wheel and watch the blanket of stars curl over the hills where i live. my heart aches. 

i remember i was seventeen when we first kissed, and all that day i had spent sharing the stage with arty twenty-somethings as an extra for a video clip. i remember i was so proud of that day, a taster of the life i wanted so badly - music, art, being twenty and 'i just moved into a sharehouse in clifton hill' and kissing boys after watching movies about music, art, being twenty etc...technically i suppose my life is similar right now but not in that 35mm technicolour film-y way that i dreamt about. i don't think it ever could be. 

i don't know why i look back and forward and back and forward with a view and idea that is different from reality. i watched my year twelve production of 'grease', which i had so shined in my head, and felt more bitter than sweet. well, perhaps not bitter, but rumbling heaviness that i could recall so clearly - wringing my hands backstage about to sing 'hopelessly devoted to you', pulling the belt of my dress tighter and tighter to shrink my waist to unbearable dimensions. how silly it all was, to leave half a muesli bar in my locker for tomorrow, because a full one would be too much right now. how relieved i am today, to be able to believe, and to realise, how stupid that is. 

i was a funny little baby bird, with a fragile baby voice and beautiful infant ideas. i watched that baby on stage, floundering and finding her feet, and wondered if i'll watch myself now in twenty years time, and see any difference.

i'm so happy, driving with the stars.