It’s high school. Senior year. Amidst bathroom tears and teenage years, AP exams come and go like emergencies, right upon you and then marvelously and miraculously move into the past. Meanwhile, I cling to emo rock like a life force, shutting myself and my good grades and perfect AP scores inside an airtight box where its sounds can echo around me, only me, and no one else. People don’t understand that I call this happiness, the sounds loud and thick as ocean water around my entire body, vibrating in a closed safe space, seeping into me, osmotic and cool, vivid enough to begin my blood to stir. This is the only place I am content, and wearing a true smile on my face, the only place my heart isn’t empty and floating, instead sinking into the waters around it, the holes filling up like a beautiful titanic.
The girls who seem to be my friend only when it is convenient for them, remember that they are supposed to tell me about upcoming concerts they are attending; this because the last time they went to see Carolina Liar, met the band, chilled with the band, got their pants signed by the band, and conveniently failed to mention that this band, one of my favorite bands of the time, was coming to our humble city Columbus Ohio, they failed at keeping it from me. I found out about it later. Facebook can be a dirty place for teenage girls.
I’m seventeen years old and the only thing that moves me is music. A thirty dollar ticket to celebrate the AP exams end. Cut forward to Lifestyles Community Pavilion on OSU campus, a packed outdoor’s audience, and enough beer to keep the college students on their feet, or off them, depending on how many beers they choose to consume. Cut past the opening band, though an experience in itself, and the inane chatter around me, into the moment when Fall Out Boy enters the stage and the lights fall onto them like angels of red and green and blue and violet. Cut to the moment when Patrick Stump opens his mouth wide and Joe Trohman strikes the chords of one song, then another, perfect moments followed by more impossibly perfect moments.
Arms rock back and forth, night sky stretching over our fingertips. Nights are peaceful things already, making lovely blankets of dark warmth over our vulnerable human bodies, a womb to our lonely adulthood. With music like love sheltering us in a warm sound, a layer of harmony spilling like liquid gold into our ears, we travel together moved as one spirit, rocking gentle and urgent to the sounds of Fall Out Boy. I don’t even care that my friends have left my side, and I know not who these people are, these tens of thousands of people surrounding me, where in their lives they find themselves, why they are here; I don’t know which of these smiling girls cries in their beds at night, which one finds on occasion a blade to slice their skin, which of these young folk just fought with their parents, their spouse, their lover, and which one just got the job of their life, a golden light sparkling, a door wide, a path long, a heart full; I just know that tonight I won’t fill the my bed covers with tears, won’t find that blade to slice my skin. This is happiness, whatever this is, and alone, for once, I don’t have to be afraid. I wish this could last forever. Maybe then I would not feel the need to right love on my arms, or to run through the streets of Columbus at one am, when the sky is dark and hiding me from the world, when my stomach is small, is beautiful. When I am beautiful.
