Teenage Dream

I'd still choose you.

He was a teenage dream, all blue eyes and faded hoodies and witty banter over AIM.¹ She still remembers the soundtrack of Dashboard Confessional blaring through the speakers of the cool, slick car he always drove so carefully. The other boys drove like serial killers, as if recklessness would impress her. 

Not him, though. 

From the very beginning, he treated her like something worth protecting.

It’s been almost 20 years since he asked her to be his girlfriend on that warm summer night in Oakland under the fireworks. They joke about being an old married couple now, people who don’t stay out past 9pm and fall asleep to re-runs of The Office. But underneath the life they’ve built, and the grief they’ve swallowed, underneath the passion and adventure, the depression and anxiety, the counseling and Zoloft, underneath the brokenness and sleepless nights and all of the fighting and making up, she can still see tiny flickers of her teenage dream, like luminaries lining the street.

His hand on her thigh in the car. The way he brags about her to his friends. He still knows every lyric to every song on every mix CD he ever made for her. He still drives like a gentleman. “Precious cargo,” he calls her. He still opens doors, makes the coffee, and reads every word she writes. After four pregnancies, three births, and a combined 64 months of breastfeeding, he still stares at the body she is tempted to criticize and calls it beautiful. 

He jokes that she secretly wishes for someone else. Someone more ambitious. More romantic. Someone who doesn’t whine about attending parties.

She laughs at the absurdity. Her teenage self is no longer living in a dream, but she still knows a good man when she sees one. She wraps her arms around his neck, pulls his face toward hers.

“I’d still choose you,” she says.

“I’d still choose you.”

Photos by Amanda Bellamy

1. Gen Z, I am sad you will never know this life.