Three little words

“And I won't be held responsible
she fell in love in the first place

For the life of me I cannot remember
What made us think that we were wise and we'd never compromise
For the life of me I cannot believe we'd ever die for these sins”
-“The Freshmen”
The Verve Pipe

We’re an unfortunate thing, our generation. Not only did we grow up listening to the heart-break songs of the 80s and 90s, but we grew up with the covers too- slower, more painful, more poignant versions of what’s been done before. We’ve spent too long lost in the “free falling” world of John Mayer. And while I will receive immediate backlash for the comparison in this statement: I think that’s always been us; an army of John Mayer’s, too tired, too jaded to commit. Our parents would say it’s because we’re selfish or lazy and that we spend all our time complaining we are too young to change the world instead of just doing it-but somewhere “ deep inside” we understand we are a backlash to our parents’ generation. We watched their marriages fall apart or struggle to stay glued together, and receded into our poetry, our blogs or our own covers. You know, something cliché, something stereotypically Gen Y.

But we’re optimistic, well, at the beginning anyway. We ride on butterflies and hormones better than any synthetic drug we can get our hands on. I know, “every generation thinks they invented sex,” or love, for that matter. But I think what separates us is the way we shy away admitting we have un-manufactured feelings in the first place. Of course we didn’t hear it enough when we were younger, but it didn’t leave us psychologically scarred. It just left us a little better prepared…

Or so we say…

Instead it makes us freak when we hear it. It feels so absurdly random that it must be a joke. “Love” is colloquial for us. It is an “ily” when we hear something funny. It is Ten Things I Hate About You and Prada backpacks. It is better associated with infatuation than with the real deal.

The first time you say it and don’t hear it back, you learn why it is so damn terrifying in the first place. It is not a one-time loss word, it creates a continuous rejection, that doesn’t create the void (after all, Gen Y is built with a hollow center) but it stretches through your stomach and occasionally up through your mouth, and your words become less trusting, less forgiving. He starts to think, to doubt, to feel like everything he does means so much more to you than to him, until it really becomes true. But he can’t be held responsible; he’s only telling the truth. We are perpetually too young, it’s too early. It’s not that we don’t want to grow up, it’s that we did very young, but we buried the adulthood in crude jokes and blue jeans, because it hurts less that way.

But like I said, it’s a continuous rejection. Every goodbye plays those long silences through your head. Any sign of closeness is a flashing warning sign screaming “RUN!” Any significant moment, any further infatuation makes you feel too emotional and too cold at the same time. You have nothing to offer this world, remember? So you don’t and if you are lucky you can chalk it up to the fact that you were “merely freshmen” and still not someone old enough to know better. Take the Valium and forget about it, you’re not allowed to not move on.