Retreating from the Twilight of Our Youth -- by Benjamin Church Smith

See this story in its original context on Page 28 of Take the Handle'sThe Youth Issue, January 2009

For weeks I said that I would write about Twilight for the Youth issue. Consider the zeitgeist. Reclaim the unrestricted feelings. Immerse yourself in the petty dramas of adolescence and embrace them as if you felt them still. As if it were ten years ago and you were in Smithfield, Rhode Island at the drive-in—watching Can’t Hardly Wait and feeling the full force of that recent graduation.

Remember back then, Marci? We were going off to college and we had so much to say about our lives and the invincibility of our dreams. We drove around all summer talking about the absurdities of growing up and pitting our own implied vows against the status quo.

And before that there was Nicki from the candy store…The night she wandered around the streets of Newport on an acid trip…I followed innocently. I didn’t know a thing about acid trips but I still wandered into that dirty apartment and tried to play the guitar. You were mysterious, Nicki. I just wanted some sense of that cool. And then showed up at the candy store a few times. Hung around. Never talked about candy. Never even ate any. Just hung around.


So I pulled out the typewriter and started typing. I thought: Old objects bring back the feelings. Look at weathered photographs. Consider the years that have passed. And so I wrote:



I thought it sounded smart, if a bit cryptic in its forced attempt to capture some poetry. Is it necessary to try to say something profound about the world each time you sit down to write? Is there any real value in being clever? Sometimes that sounds like that worst fate imaginable: Being clever.

I guess I liked Twilight well enough. In a Chicago bar during a blizzard Stefan told me, “It’s a movie about a boy who wants a girl so much that he wants to bite her and suck out all of her blood. And she wants him to.” That was smart and, in the end, I didn’t have too much to add.

Yeah, I liked the movie alright, but sometimes getting analytic about being young feels so wrong. As if I haven’t learned a thing. As if I really believe that I can put one word in front of another and actually get to the heart of that thing of which Kristen Stewart is emblematic—Nicki in the candy store, beer at the drive-in, giving your life to something that looks pretty in a high school hallway.

Another passage from a failed article on a nostalgia-inducing typewriter:



As if I couldn’t take my own advice! The snow is falling quietly in Brooklyn as I write this. Today our inebriated contributor asks, “Does that seem right to you? Is happiness just the, er, extravagance of hope? If so, does that debase what we’re doing right now?” It makes you think, but not about Twilight. It makes you think about going out into the snow. About going back to the candy store but never talking about the candy.

I wanted to do it right. To say something about this movie and claim it from the fate of bad reviews and adult misunderstandings. But when I went to the theater I got it all wrong. I didn’t even get popcorn. And after a few days of failed attempts at writing an intelligent-but-inviting analysis of this YA phenomenon I began to consider the futility and pointlessness of the whole endeavor.

Walking home at eleven in the morning. Two men speaking Polish collecting bottles from the trash and sliding an overflowing shopping cart through the brown slush of melting snow. There is so much in the world. Go see Twilight. Or don’t. It doesn’t really matter. It’s not really that good or instructive but there’s some real feeling there of how awkward and exciting it is to be young and bewildered by your own sexuality. By your strange place in the world. But if you go, bring someone you like. And, no matter what, get popcorn.