Am in the strangest place, ever. Mentally, I mean. And considering how mental I can be, this is saying a great deal.
On my i-pod, Madonna is crooning, “True Blue.” Suddenly, I’m 9 years old all over again, madly in love with both Mark & Jamie (though the money was on Jaime. I loved Mark madly, but he also drove me crazy, intimidated the hell out of me, and even at 9, I didn’t think that manslaughter was the best way to start a marriage). But I’m there, in my past. I can feel the breeze as it blows along the soccer field. I’m wearing my white pants, equally white sweater with the bunnies (who all wore braces), staring at Mark and Jamie as they played soccer, this Madonna song blasting in my mind as I pined, longed after them and wondered why it was that they couldn’t love me as I did them.
I blame Andrew McCarthy for this blast into the past. I caught the last bit of Mannequin on television a couple of days ago, and once again, I was 9–and true to my traitorous and fickle heart, I must admit that both Jamie and Mark would have had a run for their money, competing with Andrew (he was, after all, older & so sophisticated). But I have to say, it was bizarre, seeing this movie and all these feelings from a time I had forgotten came flooding back, turning me into a child, with all the requisite dreams of the future, and fears of the dark.
Does this happen to anyone else? A scent, an image, a song, and suddenly, it’s an out-of-body experience to the past, where everything is so vivid and heart-breakingly sharp, it’s a reliving of time past, rather than just remembering memories?
I have no idea where Mark or Jamie are, and I’d walk by Andrew without a second thought, today. So strange, that there are these two distinct sides of me. The adult who loves everything about her life, and the child, who apparently never grew up and still longs for leg-warmers, a Beaver Canoe sweater, and for her grade 4 teacher to be nice to her, just once.
PS
i-pod, in a further effort to drive me batty is now playing Starship Atlantis’ “Nothing’s Going to Stop Us,” which you may remember, is the theme song for Mannequin…I keep waiting for the guy from the Twilight Zone to pop into my study and do a voice-over…
