I Know the End: One Last Messy Love Letter to High School and Phoebe Bridgers

Pre-COVID, every summer, I would search out an overpriced writing course that happened to be in New York City, ten states away from my hometown. I blame my obsession with the city that never sleeps on an early exposure to it because of Home Alone 2: Lost in New York and New York Minute starring the Olsen twins. Now, I associate it with Do the Right Thing and lose myself in the foliage-filled scenes of When Harry Met Sally. It’s also the city with sounds I didn’t know were possible filling your ear every second of the day and subway mariachi bands and the Strand and endless hours spent meandering around parks and professors who advised me to get wasted to make the pain of writing a rough draft a little easier when I was 16. It’s truly a magical place.

One of my closest friends I met at one of the programs was from Arkansas and is the single greatest person who has ever walked into my life. She seemed to drink up the world in such a fledgling yet pointedly cynical way – she would string sentences together to form a sort of horribly wonderful contemporary and raunchy dialect.

“I fuck with Phoebe Bridgers, heavy,” she declared the first night we met and proceeded to bump her song, “Motion Sickness,” outside of the dorms, where we were trying to bond with two other girls. There is nothing like the first night of a summer program: there’s a sort of social contract in which everyone is in the same boat, desperate to make friends, trying a little too hard to force relatability with one another in absurd ways. We were all in our pajamas and blanketed with the beginnings of an awkward familiarity. One of my other friends had just finished sharing stories of her high school trauma and the air was so humid, it felt like the sky was pouring maple syrup over us. That night was one of the best I have experienced thus far, a definite “main character” moment if I am allowed to declare those for myself. 

I wasn’t familiar with Phoebe Bridgers and was gradually exposed to her over the course of three weeks in New York that summer. I heard “You Missed My Heart” while scrubbing my teeth and hearing my friend describe the Met with child-like wonder and “Smoke Signals” when we laid on grass quads reading during lazy afternoons. When we parted ways, me back to California, her to Arkansas, we used Phoebe Briders’ discography as a thread, tying us together despite the thousands of miles between us. Our other preferred method of connectivity? Snapchats of us crying sent in the dead of night.

Phoebe Bridgers re-entered my life at the beginning of 2021, and not because she went on SNL and smashed her guitar (much to the dismay of men on Twitter). Fresh out of a heavy heartache and growing tired of looping Joni Mitchell and Elliot Smith, her perfectly anxious songs made me feel numb in the proper way. Her music induces a lovely existential crisis with each listen. Naturally, her two albums, Stranger in the Alps and Punisher, are the only two albums I have been listening to so far this year. I can already give a relatively accurate prediction of my 2021 Spotify Wrapped.

As I find myself in March, recovering from winter depressive episodes, a gravitational reconciliation with a loved one, and feeling the impending weight of receiving college decisions in the coming weeks, I still listen to her albums when I do my European History homework or drive around for hours with no particular destination in mind. 

When I met my friend, we were both 16, undergoing the trademark loneliness adolescence brings. I went into the pandemic as an adolescent and have now emerged as a figurehead adult; yet, sometimes I feel utterly stuck, simultaneously pulled apart by these two life eras and left alone to float in limbo and just “figure” it all out – whatever that means.

Her lyrics bring me a weird sort of solace, a charming melancholy only brought on by the screams at the conclusion of “I Know the End.” The walls of my childhood bedroom have watched me lay face-down in the middle of my floor listening to “Killer” far more times than I’d like to admit. 

Her music for me will become associated with a once bleeding muscle, a never-ending lockdown, and lost high school memories, despite its happier origins. 

I think this serves as a nice microcosm to current high school seniors’ perception of high school as a whole. 

The peak-end rule is a psychological concept in which people judge an experience based on how it ends. For me, I won’t remember high school and think of queuing up songs to walk to my car after the last bell rings or taking the ACT or watching classmates make my APUSH teacher flush three shades of a deep crimson or eating Goldfish with my friends in the backseat of a Honda Civic during lunch. Now, I’ll think of scrolling mindlessly on Twitter during my statistics class, watching my teacher lecture on means and modes, levying empty words towards me. I’ll remember being unable to get out of bed until five minutes before class and the headaches from looking at a Google Hangout too long and the piteous stares from teachers. 

I won’t remember my friend from Arkansas when I listen to “Savior Complex,” but instead the gut-ripping feeling of reading, “we need to talk,” and the overwhelming state of being completely lost in regards to the next steps I will take in my life. I won’t remember the rainbow stairs that lead down to the quad of my high school, but instead my exponentially-growing screen time.

Yet, for a generation that has rose-colored glasses fastened tightly to their heads, perhaps it is good to look back on high school in a slightly jaded manner. Is it really the “glory days” for anyone? 

For me, and perhaps for my fellow seniors, the best thing I can wish for is to get over feeling stuck and focus on finding some sort of good. I’ve been able to focus on my closest friends, be it standing six feet apart watching the sun dip into the ocean at night or on a Discord call at ungodly hours in the morning. Soon, I’ll know where my feet will reside for the next four years of my life. Next week, the Phoebe Bridgers t-shirt I ordered will arrive in a carefully packaged brown box – it’s about the little things.

The future doesn’t need to be this omnipotent and nebulous force that scares the living hell out of you; rather, it’s about trying to find the good in it. Although at times the light at the end of the tunnel for the class of 2021 has turned out to be the headlight of a high-speed train, perhaps the light at the end of the tunnel is so small at some moments because of its great distance. There are still a few months left of high school, what does the light look like for you? Let’s see which of us will be truly brave enough to continue to seek it and make the most of our last few tastes of teenage angst and scintillation. After all, if we are able to take AP classes over Zoom, we are able to truly conquer anything.