Being twenty-two and essentially finished my undergraduate, this is probably the weirdest and most discomfiting period of my life yet. Luckily I was born in December, so at any given time, I can blend in with the generation beneath me. Ask anyone with a late birthday, and they’ll tell you having a late birthday is the worst thing imaginable right up until you turn nineteen. Then, when all your friends are turning twenty and reaching “adulthood,” you can still jam your fingers resolutely in your ears and scream Wheatus’s “Teenage Dirtbag” because you can still hide underneath the mantle of “teen.” But eighteen is a very interesting age and seldom receives any glory. A friend asked me recently, “If you could have anything, right now, what would it be?” I was pretty selfish. I said, “I want to have all of the people I love in one place.” So, I’ve been spending a lot of this winter reminiscing about the summer after first year, when I was eighteen.
The summer after first year, most of my friends weren’t yet of legal age and were living at home in Hamilton. We were all riding the high of either graduating from high school or making it through first year, entirely complicit in our own personal beliefs of infallibility. I didn’t know that it would be our last summer all in the same place, but I must have felt it somewhere. Being together, with no responsibilities other than some terrible three-month contract summer job, allows for some kind of magic to be wielded. It was a strange magic; neither powerful, nor particularly moving. It was merely the fleeting luck of being able to hang out with all the people you wanted to see, all the time.
I would get to the summer camp where I worked at 8:20 a.m., get paid to play dodgeball and remind kids to put on sunscreen for eight hours, and come 5 p.m., drive my parents’ beat-up forest green ‘97 camry to the house of whoever was hosting the nightly get-together which inevitably featured pizza and an illicit substance or two. Sometimes my best friend would pick me up in her mom’s minivan, affectionately named Rigga after an eventful—though possibly clichéd—trip to an IKEA. We would get iced coffees from McDonalds, and were content to do nothing more than slowly alter our bodies’ chemistry until we were more synthetic coffee syrup than human beings.
The summer after first year was also the first summer my parents trusted me to live on my own while they vacationed around Eastern Ontario, visiting the requisite aunts and uncles who dot large townships between here and Halifax. My parents left the last weekend of June and didn’t come back for three and a half weeks. It was a little too messy and the dishwasher a little too full to be considered paradise, but it was as close as I’d ever come. I extended an open-invitation to my best friends to come over pretty much whenever they wanted. My house became a sort of late-adolescent bed and breakfast, a concept that we affectionately named “Youth Hostel.” Youth Hostel had two rules: 1. I choose the music, and 2. You have to come bearing snacks.
Here we were, full of infinite possibility, barely restrained by parental supervision and only hindered by our not being of legal age. We were stuck, figuratively, waiting for the rest of our lives to start unfolding. That’s really how I would define it: waiting for the next person to have access to a car, for the pizza to show up, for the requisite sibling making the booze run to text us confirmation that they had picked up our favourite $9 bottle of chardonnay, for the next party, for the next adventure. I was taking the same 45 minute bus routes I’d been taking for years to parties out in the west end, traveling between the mountain (the escarpment, to you non-Hamiltonians) and the lake with my friends in the lush evening light. The city tensed and ready, the night not yet sprung, but the sleepy heat of the day passed. Almost always finding the time to stop at a Mac’s to get a slushie, regardless of where we were headed. Don’t get me wrong, walking into a party where you don’t know anyone, an hour late, cherry-vodka slushie in hand, just so your friend can awkwardly talk to a guy she likes wasn’t necessarily a meaningful or definitive experience, but it meant something.
It was special, to be given this weird break between lifetimes, to hang out, goof off, and grow with my friends. A hazy interim before relationships got serious, school got intense, and jobs became demanding. A time for slushies and staying out ‘til four in the morning. Three months full of days where the question wasn’t if we’d hang out that evening, but when.
Being so close to adulthood, but denied the tenable aspects made me feel like I was always on the cusp of something huge, something transcendental and worthy of screenplays, but I could never quite touch it. The entire summer, in my memory, is tinted and charged by a soft pink electricity.
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