Brookelynn Hodgin | Writer
Music is powerful. A somber drive when you’re in your feels is a teenage must. Pair the two together, and you’ve got the water works.
Feeling any emotion and listening to music is a match made in heaven to put those feelings on blast. With all of the intense hardships and struggles that come along with being a teenager, sometimes all we really need is a good drive while listening to music that makes us cry.
It’s the ultimate movie character realization moment— a revelation with the perfect soundtrack and the thought-provoking drive through your small hometown. You drive down Pico, PCH, Hermosa, living out your main-character montage dreams.
But sometimes the music and the emotions become too much, and we’ve got to park our car to shut our eyes and ponder. It’s been decided; there is no better place to do that than the root of most high-school angst: the school parking lot.
Riddled with senioritis and the impending doom of graduating and entering adulthood, senior Haley Sandstrom often finds herself crying in the school parking lot. “I sit in my Subie and cry there at least once a week,” she said. “My favorite time to sit in my car and cry is while I’m waiting for traffic to clear in the main lot, and I watch everyone going to their cars with their friends laughing and looking genuinely happy. That makes me happy – so happy that I cry.”
Sitting in the school main lot and crying is a rite of passage. There’s nothing like losing Round 2 of CIF playoffs by one point in overtime and afterwards sitting in the dimly lit school parking lot at 10 PM, crying as you realize the season with some of your best friends has ended. . . sorry, that was a little too specific.
Regardless, there are many different reasons to cry, as well as many different genres of music to cry to. It’s a spectrum; breakup songs, childhood classics, songs that you hold deeply rooted personal associations with, any Lumineers song, “Good Old Days” by Macklemore, and so many more.
Junior Shea Gallagher shares her experience with letting it all out in the school parking lot. “I was listening to ‘Riff-Off’ from Pitch Perfect,” she explained. “It emulated the inner theater kid within me just banging on the door to get out after I had a bad experience in a [water polo] game.”
The school parking has been the setting to so many intense emotional experiences for generations of Tritons. It is the best place in San Clemente to cry.
Leave a Reply