if we all went back to another time I will love you over

portraits of four different selves from four different audiences in four different decades (Belle and Sebastian, 1999-2024)

October, 1999, Coachella, CA — “…color my life with the chaos of trouble…”

I was living on my own in an apartment overlooking LAX — a mile down the road from the university I deferred my admission to weeks before classes started. I learned how to sleep through the night in that apartment. How to turn the groan of airplane engines into white noise machines. How not to be scared of the dark.

What did you learn from your time in the solitary cell of your mind?
There was noises, distractions from anything good

I was working for the book series that published my first personal essay — in an office off Via De La Paz in the Palisades. Overnight, I had gone from high school student to grown woman and because I didn’t have the experience to back it up, would spend the next five years, speeding through every adult milestone in order to catch up with my peers — colleagues who were, in those days, ten to twenty years older than I was.

My hair was bleached blonde and pixie short back then — baby bangs halfway up my forehead revealing a silver eyebrow hoop I got the previous summer.

My boyfriend, who I had been dating for several months, had invited me to join him for the weekend to see music at a festival called Coachella. I had never been to a music festival before and would have likely gone regardless of who was playing but Morrissey was headlining and Belle and Sebastian were also playing, so, SOLD.

My boyfriend’s name was Jason and we were madly in love. And by we I mean I was, hence the heartache that would ensue months later — weeks after Y2K, which felt like the end of the world… for me.

But that was January of 2000 and this was October of 1999 and everything was still perfect and I felt like Patricia Arquette in True Romance as we drove east under the weight of the desert sun in my boyfriend’s old Buick — the kind where driver and passenger shared the same seat. Where you could get all nuzzle-like in the nook of your man, attempt a hickie between cigarette drags. Offer to steer.

Comic celebrity takes a back seat as the cigarette catches
And sets off the smoke alarm

Tickets were $50 a day and there was no need to book a hotel in advance and I sound like an old timer trying to explain seeing a movie at the cineplex for a dime but I guess, if we’re lucky, we get to live long enough to oldsplain the way it was and talking about Coachella before Coachella is my “walk ten miles in the snow.”

I remember exactly what I was wearing that first day: a pair of beige Hurley shorts I bought (with my employee discount) from the skate shop I worked at earlier that summer, a black baby T with a a naked devil-woman on the front, a Betsey Johnson leopard printed purse (which was big enough for a pack of cigs, a M.A.C compact and a Nokia cell phone) and the metal-ballchain necklace that greened my neck when the temperature rose above 75.