Avril Lavigne: My Life's Soundtrack

listening to old-school Avril brings back so many memories, precisely because so much of my childhood and adolescence is marked not in years but in songs.

"Unwanted" for when i found out Iris died -- the first and only time i ever cried for someone's passing.

"Anything but Ordinary' for those summer days of writing silly song-fics with P in the Stanford quads.

"Sk8er Boi" for the first fictional piece i ever created, the one that years later inspired EP.

"I'm with You" for the One who Got Away.

right now i'm listening to "Nobody's Home" and those chorus girl "oh oh she's lost inside she's lost inside oh oh" refrains make me remember when i was lean and sun-kissed, bronzed from playing tennis 2.5 hours per day and head over heels for the older boy who i looked up to and idolized, who made my heart convulse when he confided to me during one of our online conversations that i was one of the few people he could tell anything to. (and now that i think about it, i wasn't as clever at hiding it as i originally thought. oh, the embarrassment of youth.)

i remember that one xanga post i wrote where i listed 25 strings of lyrics from 25 songs and held a contest to see who could recognize the most songs. he got first place. you got second place. you recognized the lyrics... she's lost inside she's lost inside oh oh.

that was how you reentered into my life, you know. back when i actually let people read my writing publicly, there you were leaving witty comments here and there, like some woodpecker pecking holes into the wall between us -- crumbling the barrier, so to speak. and now that i'm thinking about this for the first time in years, i don't even know what on earth made you decide to comment in the first place as if we were old friends. we never talked before then. we were two planets on our predestined orbits, nodding in acknowledgment as we passed on by and nothing more.

i wonder why you even bothered.