Whenever my life is going good, bad, or ugly I like to do this completely nerdy and yet completely life-affirming thing where I put my iPod Nano on shuffle and click through until I reach a Beatles song. Whatever the song is, it is supposed to reveal something about myself at that specific point in time.
Last night after a particularly spectacular evening that included holding the hair of my roommate back for almost two hours while she tossed more than a few cookies while simultaneously trying to kick out all of the people she invited over, I settled in my too-small bed in my too-small apartment and clicked on my iPod. I went through about two-dozen songs until I reached a Beatles tune: “Yesterday.”
Paul weeps Yesterday/ all my troubles seemed so far away. How fucking true is it that I wish for how things used to be, how I long for two years ago, seven months ago, ten weeks ago, hell I’d even settle for thirteen days ago. I wish to go back before I “broke out” on my own, when I was a big fish in a little pond, when I was considered a great writer and there were people around who loved me. And I wonder to myself late at night ‘why did I have to go/ I don’t know.’
What’s sad is that when I was living it, I hated that time. I felt confined, bored, depressed, and limited by my surroundings. I hated the girl I was two years ago, seven months ago, ten weeks ago, even thirteen days ago. They’ve all been a slight variation of the girl I am right at this very moment, only she’s subtly changed her wardrobe to match the seasons and now has such strong color tint in her hair that when people don’t know who Jane Asher is, she feels like Bobo the Clown. It upsets me because in comparison to the right-now, the past is always better. There is a part of me that is like Paul McCartney and does believe in yesterday, but there is also another part of me that can’t. That’s the part that knows yesterday is only an illusion, a romanticized version of a reality that never really existed.