004: We are all teenage girls.

Sometimes I miss the unrelenting emotions of adolescence. Plus: a poem, some stretchy pants, and a Y2K playlist.

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I’m not sure if it’s because I finally scored tickets to see Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour (I promise this won’t be another essay about Taylor Swift) but I’ve been thinking a lot about middle school and early high school lately – aka, the mid-late 2000s.

If you’re old, like me, you probably remember back in 2009 when the big thing was copy-pasting poorly worded surveys into Facebook’s now-defunct notes feature and tagging everyone you’d ever met.

One of them recently popped up in my “On This Day” feature and it led me down a rabbit hole of digging through them all, lengthy screeds with names like “Truth is…” and “My Bucket List” and “100 Truths.” They all contained inside jokes and pronouncements of undying love for people I haven’t spoken to in over a decade, who are no longer my Facebook friends, but whose homecoming dresses and yearbook signatures and favorite song lyrics and petty grievances are burned into my psyche.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the brutal ephemerality of the relationships we cultivate as teen girls. I haven’t spoken to my middle and high school best friend in over ten years. She’s married and has two kids now; I don’t even know their names. We’d once whiled away Geometry class periods planning our joint wedding reception, and I wasn’t even invited to hers. I still know the layout of her parent’s house by heart, even though I haven’t stepped foot in it this side of 2010.

It’s so funny how people that feel like your whole world as a teenager end up having little to nothing in common with you once you’re both spat out into the real world. In a way, reading through these survey answers, I barely recognize myself from half a lifetime ago.