Fall, 2000 to 2026: On Time, Love and Being 18
Twenty-six years ago today, I started dating a boy.
It was the fall of 2000. I was 18.
If you weren’t there, here’s what it looked like. We talked on landlines, which meant talking in a hallway, or a kitchen, or as far as the cord would stretch, and hoping nobody picked up the other extension.
We had CDs and cassette tapes, and some of those songs, it turns out, never really leave you. We borrowed our parents’ cars to see each other, and gave them back with the seat moved and the radio on the wrong station.
Nothing was instant. If you wanted to reach someone, you called the house. If they weren’t home, you waited. And the waiting was part of it.
What 2026 looks like instead
Now everything arrives at once. Every song, every message, every photo, all in a phone in your pocket that never quite lets you be unreachable.
I’m not nostalgic in the way you might expect. I like my phone. I like knowing where everyone is.
But this time of year, time slows down anyway. In a good way. The mornings get cool, the light goes gold, the school year starts over, and the holiday break waits at the end of it, if you’re lucky. Fall has always been my favourite season. It doesn’t rush.
Still 18, somehow
Here’s the funny thing. I’m not 18 anymore. Not even close.
And yet I still feel so much of what I felt then, the nerves and the hope and the certainty that everything important was about to happen, and some days I can’t tell if those feelings stayed with me all this time or if they just came back with the fall, the way they do, along with the sweaters and the early dark.
Watching it happen again
Our son is heading into his teenage years soon.
He’s a musician, like his dad. He’s funny, like his mom. He’s stubborn and smart, just like both of us, and entirely himself, an individual in a way neither of us planned and both of us love.
Watching him, I see the boy I started dating at 18. I see myself. And I see someone new, who’ll have his own fall someday, his own version of a hallway phone call.
This is the season that shows you the whole cycle at once. Things ripening. Things letting go.
The little things you remember
Mostly, though, on a day like today, when you notice the date and remember that something happened on it that changed the course of your life, you remember the little things that made it real. What you were wearing. What you ate. Where you worked. Who you talked to.
Twenty-six years ago, a boy and a girl borrowed one of their parents’ cars to be together.
They’re still together. They have their own cars now.
– Daniella
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