TW: drugs & eating disorders
Currently Listening to: Agnes by Glass Animals
The first time I heard Glass Animals, I was 18 and sitting on the floor of my friend’s house in Amarillo, TX. It was summer. A box fan hummed behind our voices. My skin was damp and caked in a film of dust from the oriental rug covering the hardwood floor beneath me. I was right beside a box television in the corner of the room playing local ads, volume set to low. We were listening to “How to Be a Human Being”, trying, desperately, not to place ourselves within the narrative. Max, a Gemini, my twin flame and drifting friend, had shown them to me before he left.
♪ Agnes, just stop and think a minute
Why don't you light that cigarette and
Calm down now, stop and breathe a second?
Go back to the very beginning
Can't you see what was different then? You were just popping Percocet
Maybe just four a week at best
Maybe a smoke to clear the head ♪
I remember telling him the music felt orange, that it took me somewhere else. He’d smiled at that. This was his favorite band. This was the band that played as he lived in his car in a city 9 hours away from me. These were the songs that would later soften the blow of an accidental overdose, one which reasons, for me, have continuously shifted like a face beneath moving lights.
♪ Your head is so numb, that nervous breath you try to hide
Between the motions, that trembling tender little sigh And so it goes,
a choking rose back
To be reborn, I want to hold you like you're mine ♪
For a long time, I romanticized the idea of living in Dallas. Chrome and glass. Suits and ties. It’s easier to wish for something when you don’t understand what it is. It’s even easier to fantasize a reality through the misconception that you can stop any time you want. I returned there tonight for a concert with a group of safe friends. Eli was with me. We drove through S Fitzhugh Ave and the neighborhoods nearby. All I could do was stare into the spray-painted murals and think of that living room. Think of Max.
♪ You see the sad in everything
A genius of love and loneliness and
This time, you overdid the liquor
This time, you pulled the fucking trigger
These days, you're rolling all the time
So low, so you keep getting high Where went that cheeky friend of mine?
Where went that billion-dollar smile? ♪
We met up with our friends at the pavilion, threw out a blanket stolen from a bed. I laid beneath the sun and counted the jet streams in the sky through polite conversation, a nervous itch beneath my skin. Eyedress played. Eli got us a pretzel and I told my friends about submissions at the Groke. This conversation bled into another, one revolving around my life and aspirations. All I could do was posture hopefulness. I told them about my recent queries, set my eyes to the dipping sun.
♪ Guess life is long
when soaked in sadness
On borrowed time from Mister Madness ♪
Max showed up just in time for “Life Itself”, and I admitted to him that I hadn’t listened to a single song from “I Love You So F****ing Much” because I’d wanted tonight to be my first listen. It’s both an indescribable privilege and curse to keep people, to watch the years fall over them and then, you. So many online personalities denounce sentimentality as an illusion of the past but I couldn’t disagree more. I think, maybe, the blame falls on my friends and their annual sheds.
♪ And so it goes, a choking rose back
To be reborn,
I want to hold you like you're mine ♪
To me, Max is a crystal ball and a fresh, gummy scar. He’s everything that I could’ve been but somehow escaped. He had the nerve to jump. I didn’t. Instead, I cowered and I watched and I waited and played telephone through friends of friends until he got better. Until he came back. His addiction, alike our close circle, fluctuated. Always, it was a substance. Sometimes, old. Sometimes, new. At the time, my addiction was just skin deep, presented as numbers on the scale. Calories on a sheet. We were fractured in similar ways, all of us.
So much of my writing process consists of me attempting to avoid/prevent repetition. One being the talk of drugs and addiction. I’ve fought the reoccurring mention of it with tooth and nail in all of my novels, even most of my posts here. But after tonight, I no longer care if I’m redundant, overused, or boring. The only reason I’ve gained wisdom is that it soaked into my skin from theirs as I traced the line from their jaw to their throat, checking pulses. Opening eyelids. Here, drink this. No, you can sleep in my bed. I love you. I don’t care if you hate when I say it — I love you.
God, what a horrible fucking childhood.
Ask me why my circle of friends looks the way it does and I’ll string together a stereotypical explanation of artists and addiction, the commonality of constantly chasing a futile escape. Maybe, that’s why I love them. Maybe, that’s why I refused to let go. I just saw souls without bodies in a black and white world that was ready to peel back the layers they’d tirelessly tried to draw for themselves. To protect themselves with. We were born into something cruel. I’ll never forget playing guitar hero and having to stop because T called to tell me he didn’t know where he was, that people were throwing bottles at his head. Listen, buddy. I’m just trying to get by. Our school trips turning into assemblies because someone took too many pills.
It’s easier this way.
Fainting in public and pissing my pants because I hadn’t eaten in three days. I was just too afraid to.
You don’t get it.
I honestly don’t know if I ever envisioned the now that holds us. I don’t know, at the time, that I could. Maybe sporadic reunions. Sobriety for sure, but holiday plans, casually driving 5 hours at the drop of a hat — I’m not sure. It’s a strange feeling to look at someone and see, not just a ghost, but several. Gratitude and grief, what a rare event.
Where our glasses now sit half full, they once were simply laid rim to table, cracked and flipped. Water dripping onto the linoleum. What good is a life that can’t hold any water? As T once said, “Sometimes, you just learn to lick it off the floor.”
♪ You're gone but you're on my mind I'm lost but I don't know why You're gone but you're on my mind I'm lost but I don't know why You're gone but you're on my mind I'm lost but I don't know why You're gone but you're on my mind I'm lost but I don't know why You're gone but you're on my mind I'm lost but I don't know why You're gone but you're on my mind I'm lost but I don't know why You're gone but you're on my mind I'm lost but I don't know why You're gone but you're on my mind I'm lost but I don't know why ♪
Beautiful writing and clearly brutally real. I love these songs and they feel like my secret songs. So this felt like a secret whisper to me and my own grief and snapshots. Hello.
Your words bring back distant and archived memories, and it’s strange to think that these words could describe things that I’ve learned.
The way you write is like tearing tinfoil off a window to see the sun was actually shining the whole time. It’s brilliant. It crackles.
I have to go listen to this song now. Thank you.