When I hear We're Going to be Friends by the White Stripes, a portal appears in my mind. Usually, I glance at it briefly before turning back to the present. The association is so clear that my brain always conjures it up when I hear the song. As long as it plays, a vivid memory from my past comes alive, like an open window in my mind.
Through this window, I see an elementary school kid whose face I can't quite make out, listening to music and looking outside his bedroom window. I think to myself, it's strange that I don't experience my memories in the first person. My brain seems to save the key information, fill in the blanks, then convert it into a movie. I guess that makes it easier to understand, or at least have the patience for.
As I look through the window, my mind's eye flickers with snapshots of what I remember imagining at that moment—glimpses of the kids in the song. I could taste the sweetness of adolescent joy and the bitterness of losing it to time. This was the first time I accessed nostalgia. It made me think about my own fate, knowing someday I would look back on my childhood as something that had passed. I mourned a partial death.
When I turn from the portal, I shuffle my thoughts, trying to find insight about that experience. I wonder to what extent knowledge stains the purity of childhood. But maybe purity is just a naive projection of some suburban ideal. Maybe the song was just reshaping the sadness already inside me. Or maybe I'm foolish for seeking a moral in a story about my childhood that I'm telling myself.
Whether it matters or not, that kid in my memory sees the happy children in Jack White's song and glimpses his future self observing what is present for him now from afar. He expects to feel disappointed. To see himself as an outsider, as someone who missed out, as someone who failed. He'll remember looking out the school bus window dreaming of being known but hoping nobody will sit beside him.
