Time plays tricks on us. We look back at childhood, as adults, and think how easy it was. We remember high school and being a teenager and paint both, depending on how high school was for us. If you recall them as being halcyon days, you forget how scared you were all the time; trapped in an adult’s body with no life experience and the common sense of a pinto bean. If you hated high school, you forget how there were days when anything seemed possible, that there was (for the lucky) little baggage, little life weight, and you could just grab your friends and go anywhere just for the hell of it.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower is perpetual mainstay on the American Library Association’s “Most Banned Books” because Stephen Chbosky’s masterpiece is unflinching. He remembers. The good. The bad. The awful. You’re in there somewhere. I was a wallflower, though I was fortunate enough to have friends who made me feel like I wasn’t, and we’d sometimes just….drive. And I remember those moments, the people in those cars, the music that played, and just like in this clip, I swear at that moment….we WERE infinite.
