It is on a particularly cold, particularly biting November day that you pretend to be sick for the first time. It’s not hard. You feel sick all the time, really, and as you say it out loud in the morning, when everyone is leaving and hardly paying attention to you, it starts to feel true. You are tired, of course; you are always so tired. And now you can feel the sniffle in the back of your nose, the swelling in your throat, and you know you don’t have to try to be convincing, because you’ve already convinced your body of what is true. You don’t want to go to school today. You can’t go to school today. If you went to school, you would get sicker. Who would want that for you?
As soon as everyone is gone, you bundle yourself up in your comically large winter coat, big and bright red and long, nearly to your ankles, which you would never wear to school. Anything that makes you a more obvious target is a liability. This is a new school, the second new school in the last three years, and though, unlike the other schools, this is a Catholic school, which one would think would suggest some higher degree of morality, you have in the few months you’ve been there found it even worse than you could have expected. At least during September, when the weather wasn’t too bad, you could eat your lunch out on the lawn behind the convent, where none of them would be able to find you. Now you have to stay indoors. They kick you out of empty classrooms when you try to sneak in. There is nowhere to hide, and no one to tell. There is just you and your pain: your pathetic, worthless, unimportant pain.
So here you are, free from school today, free thanks to your lies, and you wonder, as with shaking hands you take a set of keys and slip out of the apartment, why you never did this before. Why it took this special day to make you think of such a simple, if temporary, solution to your problems. Because it is a special day. Today, your favorite band is releasing an album.
You got into this band around a year ago, maybe a little more. At first it was just a song. Then it became hours listening to the one CD of theirs they have at your local library. Hours on the library computer listening to the other songs. Watching the music videos. Watching interviews, documentaries, fan compilations, live performances — live performances full of flames and screaming and blood and noise and melodrama and the singer and guitarist making out with each other. There is nothing like this, in your life of Bible verses and saint biographies and daily mass, that you have ever seen before. And the stories, too: every album, three of them before today, has a story, and it is clear from the stories that the singer knows the same things you know. The martyrs on spikes and the flames of hell. It is so new, but it is familiar, like you somehow knew it already. And you feel, even though it scares you, even though you have to hide it: they are like me. I am like this.
You walk in the cold to the mall, frost biting your fingers, and you wonder what the new album is going to be like. The new story. It’s so different this time: it’s shiny pop production and jarring colors. Not death, but the future. In this story, they are neon-colored desert rebels against the forces of corporate stability and sameness. When you get to Future Shop, you worry for a moment that they won’t have the CD, but they do. They do, and with the money you’ve put aside for months, you buy it.
At home, once you’ve concealed any evidence that you ever left the apartment, returned everything to its original place — jacket hanging in the back of the closet, keys in the basket, shoes tucked away — you carefully take off the plastic wrap. You pore through the booklet as though it’s a sacred text: you only touch the edges of the pages, scared of fingerprinting the pictures and the lyrics inside. You load the CD into your Discman and close your eyes. And for that hour, you are not quite yourself. You are somewhere else, a world that is harsher but brighter, where you are not, as you are here, completely fucking alone.
Over the next two years, things continue to get worse for you. You have your best friend, the one person you know who shares your love of the band. You have the music. And then the band breaks up. The last new song they release is almost insulting. I choose defeat, the singer sings over a plodding piano line. I walk away.
Things get even worse. It’s hard to remember, hard to think about. It keeps happening.
In this story, the rebels get killed. They do not come back.
In the story you listened to the most, a young man, full of regret, is dying of cancer. As he dies, he relives his memories: the most beautiful, the most painful. It is unclear, in the end, whether the man actually does die. But he decides nonetheless that he will no longer move forward in fear and pain. Awake — that’s one word. Unafraid — that’s another. You have those on your hands, tattooed on the day you turned 22 and the band announced they were getting back together. You really believed that coincidence meant something. That something fundamental had changed for you. You would never have to go back to the way it felt before.
It has been almost three years since then, and while things have changed, you are not sure you will ever stop being afraid. You are afraid, as you wake up in the dark, of missing your flight. That your tickets will be fake. That the people you meet will hate you. That none of this will turn out the way you want it to — all of it, all of it a waste. A waste of a life on someone like you: someone for whom there was never and will never be a place anywhere. It’s mostly okay now, better than it’s ever been, but there is part of you that you think will always be like this. The forest stands quiet until it burns; after that, the smoke takes weeks to clear.
In another story, a man is separated from his lover by death. In hell, the devil makes a deal with him: bring him the souls of a thousand evil men, and the man will see his lover again. So he does it, does the miserable, bloody work, and when he has only one more death to bring he realizes—
The band will be good. That, at least, you know. You bought tickets only a few weeks ago, on impulse, and you are flying to a city you’ve never been to on an insane 24-hour roundtrip to see them. This is the first time you have flown since before the pandemic. You spent two years under the shadow of death, and since you have emerged from it you haven’t wanted to tempt fate by deviating from your routines. You are a creature, now, of strict habit, wandering the same tiny, well-worn tracks over and over again.
This is a risk. Not at all a calculated risk. You fucking hate flying; your physical tolerance for stress and fatigue is incredibly low. But here you are, going through security at five in the morning; here you are in an Uber in Los Angeles; here you are in a bizarrely Christian Airbnb with someone you have known for years only through posts on the internet. And it doesn’t feel bad. It feels alive and new and exciting, and you remember when you were 13 and your best friend bought you both tickets to see the band, even though you would never be able to pay him back. The first concert you ever went to. An almost religious experience — more of a feeling now than a real memory, a warm, reddish glow. It blurs into the present, even more so when you arrive outside the venue, see the red lights and the merch trucks, meet more people. Here you are, and there you were: nervous, mostly silent, laughing too loud, and every word out of your mouth sounds strange. Then you are in the seats, and the lights go down, and there they are again. They are back with you, with everyone. You still know all the words. You know them even better now than you did before.
How is that possible, you wonder — how is that possible? An adult, removed from everything. A survivor of all of it. You should have outgrown this by now. The need to hear these words, to feel this, have it repeated again through the roar of the crowd and your friends beside you and the guitar and the voice of the singer carrying from the stage: I am like this. But time has not dulled the yearning. It only made it sharper.
When they return to the stage for the encore, for the first time ever, they play that song they abandoned you with. Just look at all that pain, the last line of the chorus goes. They repeat it, over and over. Just look at all that pain.
You thought, once, that you would never wake up again, and the thought made you laugh with relief: finally, finally, it wouldn’t fucking feel like this anymore.
They played the first song, too. The first song they ever released. It ends like this:
Tell me where we go from here.
Tell me we go from here.