a letter

Dear 1996,

It's been a long time, right? Almost 12 whole years. The new millennium has started. I'm old, 1996. I really miss you. Remember how we used to bleach our hair out blond and wear babydoll dresses with purple fishnets and doc marten boots and carry our cello all over campus and smoke cloves? We cut class to go to Target. We were sort of chubby and never worried about working out. We ate cheese-covered french fries and milk shakes daily. We played pool at the student union and often drank forties. Remember how we almost failed music theory? Yeah. Of course you do.

Remember how we saw the Madonna version of Evita in the theater and it made us cry? Oh, and the Leonardo DiCaprio version of Romeo + Juliet? Remember how we much we wanted to sleep with Leonardo DiCaprio? Remember how much we wanted a winged costume like Claire Danes and also to look ethereal and glamorous and get married secretly and then poison ourselves to death for love? Remember how we used to tape The X-Files every week and make all our roommates watch it, even though they kind of hated it? Remember video tapes? And how funny the Space Ghost Coast to Coast was? We went to Independence Day in the theater, 1996. You were there. You saw it. Will Smith ruled in that movie.

Oh, 1996. It was a gentler, simpler time. Buffy the Vampire Slayer hadn't yet become a TV show. We didn't know what a fandom was. We were years away from being shippers. The DVR hadn't been invented yet. For frick's sake, the iPod hadn't been invented yet. We still carried a walkman around with us. It played cassette tapes. We thought email was sort of amazing. We were pretty sure we were going to be musicians and that our parents' pleas to take computer classes meant they didn't understand our artistic natures. If someone had suggested that one day we would have a master's degree we probably would have laughed at them.

If only we could have seen into the future, 1996. Seen how irrelevant it would all soon become. Would we have worried so much about taping the X-Files if we'd known that in just one short decade the entire series would be available on DVD? Would we have drank so many forties if we'd known that in a few years we'd be desperately trying to lose weight before a 12 mile hike in the back country? Would we have eaten so many cheese fries? Yes. Yes on the cheese fries.

Sometimes I want us to go back to that place, 1996. When lung cancer and physical fitness were of no concern. When we could still get away with a miniskirt. When we still ate dairy. But could we have kept up that lifestyle for much longer? We were drunk an awful lot, 1996. We smoked a pack a day. Our hair would have eventually fallen out from all the bleach. And would we really want to stay in a pre-Buffy world? I don't think so. Not at all. But maybe sometime you and I can get together. You know, catch up, drink a beer. I'll wear a babydoll dress. You bring the VHS copy of Romeo+Juliet. I'll bust out my tapes of the X-Files, season 4 complete with mid-nineties television commercials. Let's remember the good times, 1996. We'll always have cheese fries.

Love always,
jessie