#sydnee the world you seek is out there

[unpretty]

just listened to the latest sawbones and. please tell me someone has told sydnee "i don't want a good book to end i just want to read about them being happy forever" mcelroy about ao3.

[macyinmotion]

On a lighter note, I want to think about the concept of nostalgia, and the weird phenomenon that occurs when your brain knows a time in your life was not ideal, maybe even toxic, but your heart still hangs on to it. 

For me, I feel that polarized pull whenever I hear country music. 

Growing up in Walla Walla, there wasn’t much to do except play into the small-town tropes of eating at the same restaurant, driving around in your best friends truck, and watching the sunset. I had two best friends, and together we made our way through some really shitty boyfriends, some awful singalongs, and some really powerful memories. During that time, I was not the person I am today; school was my number one priority, I never took risks, no matter how small, and I always felt like I didn’t quite belong wherever I was. 

I did not like the person I was, and that reflected in the way I let people treat me, and the people I began seeking out to try to make me feel better. In my head, there wasn’t a basket case or lost cause I could not save with the power of positive thinking and self-sacrifice. I drug myself through the mud to make these people smile, and when they refused to smile all the time, I took it like a bullet to the chest. 

On the inside, I was drowning. On the outside, I was on my way to a 4.0 GPA and the university of my dreams. 

The reason the whole concept of nostalgia is difficult for me, is because the good parts of my Walla Walla life were not completely overshadowed by the bad, not by a long shot. I loved my close friends, no matter how they made me feel sometimes, and I loved where I lived: middle of nowhere, surrounded by fields and vineyards and orchards, where the sunshine touched everything and the mixture of rain and alfalfa created one of the most euphoric smells I’ve ever encountered. I rode my horse for hours and never passed the same tree twice, I read books in the sunshine, and I ate the best enchiladas whenever I wanted. 

The silly thing is, that those years of my life — the good, the bad, and the stuff not worth remembering — was coloured by the sound of country music. Billy Currington, Rodney Atkins, Tim McGraw, Jake Owen, George Strait, Brad Paisley, the kinds of artists that sang in a way that made tears well up in your eyes, love fill your heart, and made you want to hug your friends and never let go. And people laugh about country music, because if you’ve never driven down that dirt road, seen that sunrise, or met that one girl, it really does sound silly. To me, though, country music comprises some of my fondest memories. 

 So, because I can’t put my entire youth into the same box, I find myself looking back and letting the good colour in all the bad, and it all takes on the same tone of breezy, not-a-care-in-the-world, watching the sun set with my best friends. 

There’s this Tim McGraw song that goes:

“I thought about songs that make us feel better I thought about faith that ties it all together I thought about now, then thought about forever I thought about fire and how we walked through it The times I got it right, the times I blew it I thought about real, I thought about good, I thought about true And I thought about you”

When I hear that song, I can’t help but smile; it brings back every single wonderful memory I have, and it fills me with this overwhelming warmth that I can’t seem to describe, but it makes me happy-cry every single time. 

I didn’t even like that song back then, and I even made fun of country music — I said I only listened to it with my friends, but the truth is, its always been my feel-good go-to, because it represented my feel-good people. When the chorus plays, and can literally see those girls — Taylor in the drivers seat, Sydnee with the window down, and me in the middle — belting out the words like nothing else mattered. I can feel the cold water from that swimming hole, and I can feel the sweat under my thighs and the bruise on my tailbone from riding bareback all afternoon in the hot sun.