peopleplacesandthings

A series of who I was, where I’ve been, and the people I’ve loved.

i.

I was in Walmart when I got the call, and everyday since, I've tried to remember how I would have described loss before that day. 

ii.

I used to associate music with physicality, rushes of adrenaline or your hair caught in a strangers button up, beading sweat and bruised knees from venue floors. March came and I was left without the bass radiating under my feet, or the murmurs from crowds in unfamiliar cities, everything felt foreign and painfully two dimensional. I was grieving a friend, reckoning in overwhelming anger and grief, finding love then fighting to believe I deserved it. Years before I would have turned to an album, something biting and cold, or tender like my mothers voice when she’d echo out Sade to me each night. But I was hiding from the ghosts that haunted my favorite records, cold corners of the room looming with tarnished sculptures, eulogizing my naivety.

iii.

All at once I felt everything, wholly, against all the resistance and walls put up. Bass tremors felt just the way anger feels as it sits behind my teeth, synth warbles and twists like my uncertainty. A simple and monumental shift, and music went from being about the space I could take up in a New York club, to how it resonates in my ribs. For years I wrote about music in relation to memories, artifacts of others and past selves. Now I can’t help but make all my prose about learning to honor my rage, or the first time I felt tremendous loss, and how all these feelings are akin to songs so fiercely that it brings me to my knees.

iv.

Love to me is a mirror, you give a person a piece of yourself, and soon enough you can see it there looking right back at you. Starting to notice the softness of your smile and the timbre of your laugh. Learning to love yourself how someone loves you seems like a radical thought to someone who keeps themselves out in the cold. But it’s real, and it's warm.

v.

Going back to shows felt like being a stranger in my own home. The walls forged and memories I made didn’t recognize my touch, rejecting my hands, looking for the callouses of who they used to know. I was terrified of everything being different, almost as much as I was that things would be exactly the same. Familiar faces flooded in, smiles on rosen cheeks, chapped lips muttering nervous laughter. Heavy air cut by limbs learning to move again, devotion flooded veins and strained voices letting go of pains from yesterday and years before. The remembering was innate, falling into old tradition, dusting off the relics of the life I thought had come and gone.