Quarantine

This summer would be my 10 year high school reunion. Maybe it still will be, who knows. If you’re reading this, Plano West High School Senior Class President Matt Leudke, inquiring minds want to know.

Everything is really weird right now. I feel lonely and sad and tired but also, mostly I feel okay. Which is kind of how I felt 10 years ago, at 18, so unsure of everything. I’ve been thinking about 18- year-old me a lot during this quarantine. I wonder how she would handle this. 

I was such a firecracker back then. I wanted to run wild and get loud and break the rules, but for the most part I didn’t do any of those things except for the loud part. Teenage Kelly wanted so, so badly to live recklessly even though she was basically always afraid. Adult Kelly is still really loud, and I’m still basically always afraid. 

I still listen to the same terrible whiny pop punk bands, I still curse like a fucking sailor, I still spend hours wandering around my neighborhood thinking about absolutely nothing. It’s crazy how close I still feel to 18, 10 years and so much life lived later. I think maybe that girl would be handling this quarantine the same way I am. But by god she’d be wearing so much eyeliner. An unfathomable amount of eyeliner. 

This blog actually existed then, too. And while adult me has focused more on writing what’s funny, teenage me wrote a lot like this. She was meandering and moody and pointless and introspective in a way that adult me absolutely isn’t. She wrote constantly; I barely write at all anymore. She would have rolled her eyes so hard at that semicolon but I’m a professional writer now, baby Kelly, so suck it.

I used to sign all my blog posts with “pieces.” I can’t remember why I thought it was so funny, but I really thought it was funny. 

Pieces,

Kelly