“Seventeen”
Youth Lagoon

longing |ˈlôNGiNG| - noun: a yearning desire.

When I was twelve, twenty-five felt like it was a lifetime away. Twenty-five was old, and I would probably have tacky brown carpet in the home of the gated retirement community I lived in. Granted, my current apartment does have tan carpet and some would say Florida is one giant retirement community itself.

Still, here I am. Twenty-five. Male. Tan carpet. My twenty-two-year-old friends say, “Hey, old man.” My twenty-eight-year-old friends say, “You have so much life ahead.” Thanks to twenty-five, I now occasionally have to eat healthy because everyone who said all those bacon and cheese fries I ate from Outback would catch up with me were actually right. My knees hurt more than I would care to say. I have a frequent desire to go to a golf course. And there’s apparently something called a 401K I’m supposed to look into.

Longing can be a tricky thing.

I’ve learned it’s not limited to my own experiences, or anyone’s really. You can long for worlds you’ve created in your head.

You can long to go back to when you were on the moon, or even when a race to the moon was something that electrified society. You can long for when you swung from a tire attached to a rope into a lake. You can long for the smell of fried chicken filling up your home after you were out running around your neighborhood finding ways to build and destroy your innocence.

Longing has no lines to cross. It just expands in your chest until each step you take cracks the pavement.

“Don’t stop imagining. The day that you do is the day that you die.”

I tend to listen to Youth Lagoon’s The Year of Hibernation without a touch of reality in mind. I find myself longing for that classic summer montage where I’m in the passenger seat of a car full of friends whose faces filled each day for two solid months. That scene with the windows down and the beach and ocean and falling sun to the right. The kind of moment that could last forever.

I don’t want to believe I never got to live this memory. This album leaves me longing for it nonetheless, and that is enough.

Longing can be a tricky thing.

—Chris
TWLOHA Staff