Picture me with brown hair and a guitar.

Picture me with brown hair and a guitar
singing folksy songs about shooting stars
standing on a stage at the front of your high school...
with a microphone that made me look so cool,
that shoulder thing that everyone talked about...
and just forget the name I've gone without. 

It's the weirdest thing to me just which people DO recognize me and which people DON'T.  I'll run into people I was close to when I was young, or people I admired, and they don't have a clue who I am.  But I'll have people walk up to me in a shopping mall who I swear I don't know, have never seen before, can't even have grown up in the same state as me, and they are absolutely certain that they know me.

The funny thing?  They're usually right.  

They never have my name.  They're not sure where I come from or what my family life was like.  We were never really friends.  But, "I know you from somewhere!  Where do I know you from???"  and then there's the thinking.  There's the pondering and the wondering.  There's "Were you friends with Stacy?"  And "Didn't we go out?"  "Isn't your name Melissa or Elizabeth or something?"  And I shake my head, expecting them to walk away thinking that I just have one of those faces.

And then it hits them.  "You went to Northwest High School, didn't you?  OMG, you used to have brown hair, didn't you?  OMG, and you played the guitar."

They never know my name, but they remember my voice... or at least something like it.  They remember my old guitar that sometimes hit the microphone and the way that I jerked my shoulder sometimes when I strummed.  "You sould like Jewel," they'd say, and they always wonder if I'm famous yet.  No, I tell them, I just don't seem to be that girl.  "But you are!" they say. "You are and you were fantastic!!!!"

I've never done big shows.  Once or twice I've opened for another no-name band with a friend or sang in a choir show by myself.  Once I even went to a television station to record a song that I now regret having ever written (oh it was completely pretentious.  Come ON, who does three key changes in one song???  And I stole a line from the movie "Titanic", which in itself should say something.)  

I never played that well, honestly.  Don't get me wrong, if you don't play or know anything about the guitar I sound great, but if you DO... I'm kinda "meh".  I'm proud of my singing voice but I'm not under the impression that it'll ever get me anywhere.  I've been mistaken for a big rock star, and when you boil it down I'm not much more than a high school kid with a guitar and a signature shoulder-thing.

But sometimes I'm proud of it.  It makes me smile to remember the days when I actually got to play in front of people.  I remember how they clapped and cheered and even the hip-hop kids praised me.  I'm not sure WHY, but I think that they just had fun listening to something marginally original.  It was stuff they couldn't do so they were impressed by it.  And I'm cool with that.  Out of all of the traumatic memories I have from my childhood and from high school, that one I can accept.  And people who bump into me in the shopping mall remember a time in their lives when things were more carefree, and I'm cool with that too.  I don't know if either of us recalls "the girl with the guitar" quite as she really was, but does it matter?  She's who we remember her as.  In the case of memory, perception is reality.

But nowadays, I'm just me... the same girl I've always been.  I don't carry the guitar much anymore but I enjoy it when I do.  I don't play for many people anymore but if they appreciate it then it's a blast.  Over the years little has changed but the audience.  I rarely have one.  But its nice when I do.

Picture me with brown hair and a guitar, and I might be your big rock star.

--Crystal


--this entry submitted for LJ Idol Topic 4, ""I Think I Thought You Were Someone Else" (Mistaken Identity)".