#i think i got a mild heatstroke on saturday

[ireallyamabear]

i'm serious, i can handle that it might be some kind of cancer or maybe a bad traffic accident on my bike that will get me, but the inevitable statistical bulldozer of untimely heat death around maybe 2040 when the temperature curve will have lapped my body's ability to adapt due to aging is genuinely terrifying

[thedarkcaustic]

When We Were Young

I guess I want to talk about it. 

I’m home alone. Sober and sad and sort of desperate for a hug. 

I spent the weekend in Vegas with my best friend from childhood. We got tickets to When We Were Young and were lucky enough that ours were for the Sunday show and not the cancelled Saturday show. 

I just have so many fucking feelings, I don’t even know where to begin. Lots of good feelings - it was amazing. It was amazing to be there, to see so many people excited to show that the music and the fashion and the feeling lived long beyond seventeen. In my experience, everyone was polite, even in the sun, in the lines, like we were all somehow strangers and friends. We were all revisiting the ghost of our youth. 

It’s the closest thing to a religious experience I’ve had in a long time. And when I was a goth little teen, I was also a very devout Christian and somehow the music and the scene played into my faith. That’s something I don’t much feel like explaining these days. I never felt like my love of all things emo, my suicidal thoughts and self-harming behaviors made me a bad Christian. 

I’m an atheist now. Which is neither here nor there. 

It honestly felt like a pilgrimage. It’s sacrilegious. My flights to Vegas were full of the muttering of multiple people on the same journey as me - all of us going to that patch of asphalt in the desert. Standing out in the sun waiting to get into the venue, I was struck with a nostalgia that threatened to close my throat. We are all who we always were - teenagers that want to scream along to our favorite songs. 

When I was younger, I didn’t think there was a point in going to a show unless you were going to be right up against the stage. At seventeen, I stood in line for eight hour or so to be as close to My Chemical Romance as possible. I was functionally only a few feet away from the stage. I got heatstroke for my efforts and was violently ill the rest of the night.

Having no desire to to get crushed, we stood in the back of this show. It was still incredible when they took the stage. 

We all certainly felt our age - people trickling off before the last bands were done. I woke up the next morning and felt like absolute dogshit - standing in the sun for some thirteen or so hours really took a toll on my body. We aren’t young anymore. But I still can’t believe I’m an adult. 

Throughout the event, I saw shirts and pins and signs that said things to the effect of, “It wasn’t a phase.” There is something so rightfully sweet about acknowledging that it isn’t a phase - that we may have all gotten our degrees and our office jobs and wear mild, professional clothing on the day to day. But given half a chance, we are busting out all the black again. We are still ourselves, underneath our grown up cosplay. 

For me, that’s the heart of it - I am, somehow, the most distilled version of my teenage self. I just now have an income, and coping skills, a fully formed frontal lobe. But who I was - lonely, angry at injustice, ready for life to start, queer, wanting to make a positive change in the world - all of that is still here. Still me. 

It’s been hard to listen to MCR, Taking Back Sunday, the Used, We the Kings, and the Starting Line for many years. Sometimes it brings me back to that powerless place of teenagehood. Sometimes it brings me back to the powerful friendships I had. To the long drives on the desert highways. To my desire to grow into a world-changing adult. To my angry, uncontrollable desire for love. To the sense of helplessness I felt over my life. And those parts are hard to touch. Those parts of my teenage self are hard to engage with. Because my life didn’t unfold the way I thought it would when I was young.

This is all to say - I don’t listen to these bands on the regular like I did as a teen. They don’t live in my car’s radio like they did my senior year of high school. But the chance to see them in person, to go back, to be this version of myself meeting the teenage version of myself - that was an experience I couldn’t pass up. 

I’m still struggling to put it into words - the sorrow and the joy. The grief and the nostalgia. The contentment and the overstimulation. The past and the present.