My first real kiss was a gay kiss. People tried to tell me that it didnāt count, that girls practice on eachother while we wait for boys to pay attention, resolved into a dystopian unilateral hetero future. I knew that I got anxious and sweaty around her and I lied to impress her and no boy had ever made my chest cave in like that.
We are skipping class behind the basketball court, passing a Newport sheād taken from her older brother, who was in a band we both loved, back and forth, wearing matching flannels - how gauche - and sharing a set of headphones flipped inside out. Solo Peter Murphy, āCuts You Up,ā that sharp synth hook twisting. If I close my eyes I see late skate at the indoor ice rink, when they shut off most of the lights and project soft white faux-stars against the high wood beams and all you could hear was some employeeās tinny radio turned up so loud it distorted and the whoosh-whoosh of skates and people falling and giggling.
I kiss her. For what feels like a very long time but in reality is probably thirty seconds, she kisses me back. We pull apart, and I get so nervous I wipe my nose on the floppy sleeve of my flannel. Neither of us say anything. We continue listening to āDeepā. The Newport burns down to ash, and she crushes it into the leaves with a toe.
We would be friends for seven more years, but weād never talk about that kiss again.
Iām definitely swimming in an excess of black bile, always have been, so itās no wonder Iāve always been a sucker for a sad song. D and E, minor changes, maybe a shift up to G minor if Iām feeling feisty. Thatās whatāll get me under the breastbone and thatās what I write. Itās not so much the heartbreak songs because I donāt love easily, Iām not consumed with love, love is an embedded and complicated affair for me not given to narratives easily explainable in two to three minutes tops. Itās the songs about alienation, ennui, disrepair, dissociation. I like the big melancholic sweeps but I like the small, barely noticeable twinges more.
āThere are two kinds of queer kids,ā my friend Elena says. We are sitting cross-legged on her bed in her dorm room eating tortilla chips and listening to Move Into The Villa Villakula, because we are nothing if not stereotypical late ā90s dykes. There are so few queer stories and so many straight ones that we find ourselves wedging our way into roles we donāt fit just to find some kind of home in our small, insular world, just to appear recognizable to others, just to be seen. āYou and me, right? Iām all glitter, Iām pushing myself outward, Iām laughing so much and partying so much that nobody can see how sad and scared and alone I feel. Iām a parody of what it feels like to fit in.ā
I nod. I am halfway listening to her and halfway listening to Ruby Falls and thinking about how Elena has a girlfriend and I do not. I feel ugly, awkward, all wrong. I wish I could be glittery. I am not. I feel sunken and sour. It has not been a good year, it has not been a good decade, I donāt trust people for good reason and I cry too much and I walk around campus with headphones in because music is the only thing that feels right and sane and warm to me, even the saddest of songs, even the loneliest of songs.
āYou, youāre the other kind. Youāre like ā¦ whateverās not glittery. Black matte or something.ā
āI turn inwards,ā I say.
āYou turn inwards. You donāt force people away from you with your rainbows, you cloak yourself and you disappear.ā
Sheās right. āTwo ways of coping with a world that looks at you funny at best,ā I agree.
āYeah.ā Elenaās mouth is full of chips. We chew companionably, thinking about how fucked up it is that we all have to strategize in this way. I hit repeat on āSpanish Olive,ā because the line āI hated being a girlā really resonates with me, as it does with a lot of us. Not Elena, who is butch as hell but very solidly female; she lives in her body unapologetically in a way I wish I could understand. I am clawing at pictures of femininity, itching at the truth.
I make him a mix, heās expecting flirtatious messages. He gets ponderous guitars, thudding, wailing, pounding. The only fast songs are blurry and hard. A few of the songs are about fucking but most of them are about dying. Getting to know you, right?
āThere are a lot of songs about, like, the cold war on here.ā He is amused.
Black matte, black bile. Itās what keeps me humming.
I know a lot of people, my contemporaries, who are dead. Iām 35 and I shouldnāt but I do. Suicide, murder, overdose. We are not here because of free choices weāve made but because of what we are and how that constrains our opportunities in an unbalanced world: people who have endured great trauma in the borderlands. We resist with gallows humor and the refusal to be pigeonholed as ONLY freaks. We are freaks, yes, but that does not negate the fact that we are also humans who fuck up daily and are petty and absurd just like anyone else.
Sad songs sing to us because we are always in mourning and mourning is exhausting and sometimes we want to rest our heads on a wall of noise or the sateen of a synth glissando, because we are reminded by our bodily responses that we, despite our chances, still breathe.
areudirty
stormborns
gummygunk
vaporwave
blakekathryn
jbbartram-illu
