What Was it About 2016?

I am seventeen years old, sitting at a coffee shop in the center of town wearing an infinity scarf. It’s dark and snowing outside. My friends and I hover over hot chocolates and periodically scroll on our phones. Each of us has a different Rifle Paper Company case appearing like miniature translucent gardens of marigolds, roses, and bluebells in the palms of our hands. Once we’ve scrolled through a sea of classmates’ selfies and meticulously curated breakfast spreads from our favorite micro-influencers, Instagram alerts us, “you’re all caught up!” We set our phones down on the maroon glass tabletop; that’s all there is to see. The café stays open late, our version of a local pub where we run into those we’re hoping to see and those we’re hoping will see us. Highly caffeinated, we discuss the same topics over and over until our porcelain cups are empty. We are closer than close and tremendously apart.

We don’t talk about my dad killing himself a few weeks ago because we don’t know how to. Instead, we keep it light. We’re finally seniors; it’s finally 2016.

It’s been our year since third-grade computer class, when we were instructed to include it in a username following our first and last initials. We knew time would catch up to us eventually, but still it remained a concept as inconceivable as space, death, or what our teachers did on the weekends. We often remark on how it’s the perfect graduation year. I don’t believe I have the gift of synesthesia, but I know the combination of numbers feels smooth on my tongue, then sharp and charged, lingering in the air. We work jobs babysitting, scooping ice cream, and making sandwiches to save our money for Free People peasant tops and purposefully weathered flannels. The original cast recordings of Hamilton, Waitress, and Heathers underscore beach drives along the coast of 1A. Before performances or backyard photo shoots, we apply the Urban Decay Naked palette to each other’s eyelids. Cold hands cup my chin as my friend lifts my face to observe her work. She asks me to close my eyes and hold still, and I am enveloped in the kind of calm that soothes my temples, making them pulse with a slight buzz.

I’ll look back at 2016 as a sort of fairytale. There was just something about that year—when my black bootie heels sunk into the wet ground at my father’s funeral, and my lungs filled with smoke after my first hit of weed on the beach. I can confidently say it was one of the best years of my entire life. It’s not the grief I’ll remember. I hadn’t made it to grief yet. But the things put in place to distract me, which in turn made me the most present I have ever been. I’ll later learn that dissociation will be a part of the thing that saved me. I was far more focused on the boy who didn’t like me back and the progression of my tan lines than on a concept as inconceivable as suicide. It was in those superficial, cringey, and girlish pastimes that I found the will to stay alive.

I am twenty-seven, and the coffee shop in the center of town has been closed for some time now. The place I grew up in exists as a Truman Show–like stage set of the past, designed to coax me back into a former self I know no longer exists. But sometimes, when the lighting is just right and a certain smell hits my nostrils, I can be tricked into thinking a decade hasn’t passed. I am still seventeen. We are driving along the coast. Summer is coming. The music is loud.