Smile and that will mean I may

          I watched The Rocky Horror Picture Show with my apartment-mates last night.
          It was like smelling baked goods or listening to an old mix tape - I was thrown, immediately and unexpectedly, into vivid, heady memories, straight back to my high school days.
          I'd forgotten how often my friends and I had watched it all those years. We knew every line, knew the audience participation, knew the songs, would dance along to the Time Warp. Some of us were even cast in a local theatre's production of the Rocky Horror Show. I was probably the least enthusiastic of our group, which is impressive, as I was definitely into it (I have a hot pink feather boa to prove it).
          I was ... unprepared for the memories it brought back. I didn't expect the wave of nostalgia that struck me when the DVD menu opened, and those fire-engine-red lips and white teeth told me that the feature I was about to view would thrill me, chill me, and fulfill me.
          I guess I was shocked to have a specifically high school memory. I have three friends who went to my high school - Marie, Jess, Drew - and it wasn't really high school, it was band practice. The rest of the people I knew were acquaintances, situational friends (we saw each other all the time and didn't know what else to call our relationship with one another). We were civil and polite, but did little together outside of school. Instead, the friends I hung out with on weekends came from this strange, patchworked circle full of strange, patchworked people.
          We came from all over the county, represented five different high schools. We met in gradeschool or were neighbors, met in community theatre or in the cafe of Borders, introduced friends of friends, and the odd circle grew, filled out. We spent all of our time together, partying, watching movies, buying books and music, going to concerts, baking, having picnics, singing, talking, debating. For me, thinking about high school means thinking about grades and classes, or about band. When I think about friends, high school doesn't factor into the picture. My circle of friends, and the memories we share, spans the time from grade school up through today. I entered into the picture in middle school, others came in later still, but our stories are collective, rooted in people, not years.
          So it was weird for me to be struck with such a sense of time. But I guess Rocky Horror occupied, very specifically, our high school years. We still enjoy it, watch it on Halloween and other rare occasions, but it isn't the same.
          It was unsettling to be confronted with such an obvious ... schism? ... of time. It was comforting and bizarre to feel the shift, the gap, between who I am now and the person I was then. It's a significant gap. The past few years have been dramatically formative. It's like when I realized that my first-year seminar in college was years, plural, ago. I'm still weirded out by the fact that I'm twenty-one. On paper, it means I'm unquestionably an adult. To everyone else, you're still a kid at eighteen. At twenty-one, you're grown up. Irresponsible, maybe. But capable.
          I realize that I have two decades of memories behind me.

          All this from watching a movie.