I read your textbooks, so I know they say that 2010 was another one of those years where the world shrank, shriveling under the glow of sizzling technology, hopping at the “speed of light” (often took three seconds for a web page to load, it laughs in parentheses) and curdling like milk under the heat, not of global warming, but of the fuss that grew around it like mold. Wars, death, catastrophe; the ropes that had always wrenched us apart had somehow gotten twisted around us in knots, and the harder we pulled, the tighter we were cinched in.

For history, the world got smaller that year, but for me, it grew nearly as vast as the universe, maybe a few square light years short, but still with the same number of stars crammed inside. That was the year I got my first car.

It was a '97 Toyota Camry. 1997, that is. I'm sure you wouldn't recognize one of those dinosaurs if you saw one, they're practically sins now. (The words “twenty-eight miles to the gallon” should be reason enough for that.) It was beige. It was my mom's car, and she had bought it when I was six or seven.

That was when it was okay to want to be your mother, at that age. She was a teacher, and I was going to be a teacher. It wasn't like now, when you have to be your own person. When you were six years old, you were your mother. Maybe it did hurt our creativity, originality, progressive society, like they always say it would if we let people do that now.

When she bought that car, I wanted a red one, shining like the strawberries I thought grew in my garden. It was in reality just a slew of half-dead petunias in a patch of packed, dry dirt. Maybe my wish really did come true because the Camry was as sandy colored as my little desert of a flowerbed.

That's why, in 2010, when I was sixteen years old, I was handed down a beige Camry. I never was a beige girl. Shame.

When I was young, it was still normal to have a rebellious phase as a teen.

“Oh, it's just a stage she's going through; she'll come out of it.”

“Just wait a few years.”

“Sometime you'll miss these days.”

These were the things that mothers laughed at, watching sitcoms on TV, but also confided to each other during swim meets and the intermission of the school musical.

I know it's hard to wrap your mind around all this. It's really more different from current times than New York is from New Mars.

In my rebellious phase I wanted to be a writer. In Hollywood, in the sewer, it didn't matter as long as you couldn't get there from Kansas City, my city. (I didn't think it was my city at the time. It was their city, then. Don't try to understand that part, you couldn't possibly. Not now.)

I hung out with a lot of people who were “different.” They were all the same, running through the mammoth of a copy machine, must have been at least a foot by a foot by a foot and a half, that sat on my desk. Whoosh, there she was again. Whoosh whoosh whoosh. And again and again and again.

By the time I got my car I was over that. Again, I thought I might want to be a teacher. I spent an entire spring imagining where I was going to go in my Toyota, my new Japanese growling beast.

All my images smelled like oranges. Dates down to the city. Just spinning the wheels around for no good reason at all, looking at the stars. The stars that we wouldn't be able to see for all the lights from cars like ours on the streets.

But that was okay. I didn't need stars because that was when I was my own version of infinite.

That was the time when being infinite was a good thing. It was a paradox in a way because it meant that you didn't have to be forever or go anywhere and see the world or really do anything at all. Here and now was just all right.

I tell you this because I know you don't have any of this now. And that's all right. The world could do with a few less infinite people. And maybe you understand that.

And maybe you'll forget about the third paragraph down on the six hundred and fourteenth page of your textbook that talks about “the youth culture of that decade” and just remember this.