She Reminds Me

When Felicity (yes, the television program) premiered, it was 1998. I was a senior in high school, an insane person on the edge of everything, who was at that time juggling seven college applications, two art classes, physics, a handful of other (comparatively less demanding) classes, daily play rehearsals, and all the soap-operatic drama that comes with being seventeen. Most of the drama was imagined, but that has never in the history of humanity made any of it less serious, because, as they say, or maybe nobody says – maybe I say – the mind is everything. Everything.

I watched Felicity with fierce devotion, and related to the characters in a way that I’d never related to any others the WB had produced. There was nothing about that show that didn’t strike me as meaningful and straight-outta-life, even and especially the stark camera shots, the above-average vocabulary, the saddish music that kicked in to let the viewer know that someone was having a Moment. In my head, this was also how I lived. My emotions were black-and-white photography, my progress set to guitar music. The conversations I imagined having were good in the sense that a writer might have written them. And I was going to follow my heart, and I was going to live in the city, and I couldn’t grow that great, curly, I-am-what-I-am hair, but I’d find something to do about that, too. I cried throughout the first season.

The show was about making decisions, particularly the ones that come fast and furious as you’re in college, trying simultaneously to grow up and not to. Felicity was a year ahead of me, and so I used her as a role model and a preview of what was to come, which was slightly dangerous and somewhat stupid, but everyone did it. Does it. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s rare to the point of being almost impossible not to base your life, at least some part of it, on someone you know, or think you know, or know of. This person is the one who informs your choices, is the voice in the back of your head, or whose work and/or life has inspired you to reach for something. I think most people have someone like that. I have a few people.

I’m not saying that Felicity, the fictional New York student, is one of those people for me – anymore. But I’ve spent the weekend watching the first season on DVD, which I haven’t seen since it aired originally, and I’m surprised by how thoroughly I still can relate. It’s been eight years since I was a freshman in college, but I’m no more sure of my direction now than I was then. I still wonder what I’m doing here, “here” being anywhere I happen to be. I still wonder what I’m ever going to do about men, having made mistakes enough in that department to fill my own – albeit extremely short-lived – prime time soap opera. I still wonder whether the decisions I’ve made, basically since I’ve been making decisions, were the right ones. And you know how people always say, with their chins in the air, that they have no regrets? Yeah, I don’t think that way. I’m certain that if I could go back in time, I’d do many things very differently.

Of course, I’m saying to myself, as I sit here in the yoga pants that have done no yoga, the mind is everything. I could choose to look at my decisions and see them as solid, in that, like 99% of all decisions ever made, they could’ve turned out worse – and they could’ve turned out better. Or I could choose not to see them at all, but to take my current reality and only move forward with it, and never think back. But then again, I know what I have in the mind I’ve got. It travels in time. It loves to watch television and cry with people it doesn’t really know. It can keep me busy all weekend, just flashing pictures and playing songs, squeaking what if, what if, what if? Actually, it’s the best show around.