eatnorthamerica

If you’d told me fifteen years ago that I would end up watching the Manic Street Preachers play in a concert hall in Canada, I would probably have looked at you the way people look at people who are, perhaps, screaming on a soapbox somewhere on a street corner.

But there I was, stuck somewhere in space, some place in time, jolting up and down, feeling half my age, twice my age, feeling oddly invisible.

These jolly geezers from Seattle said they’d travelled up to Vancouver just to see the show. I never cared much for the Preachers. Too pop, who knows? Yet five feet from my nose, that band belonged on stage; lead guitar punched and crisp, ripping seven hells of sonic waves out of aural membranes, drumbeats stretched tsunami taut and crashing, emo-looking guitarists willowing in the background, a whole new generation of teenagers falling irrevocably, unrequitably, in love, the strains of la tristessa shredding sweet sorrows over a broken setlist.

The band picked up more momentum. The geezers, friendly as they come, took photos of the crowd. A random girl leaned over, and with unfathomable compulsion, yanked the front of my shirt sharply down. Our moment never made it onto the photograph that flashed, a pulse after all sartorial function was restored. And I laughed. She poked me in the cheek. She did it again. Later, she pressed her finger against my skin and said, ‘I’m sorry — I just can’t help bugging you.’

And I found that I mind less, these days, being bugged.

Later, I listened to Zoe Keating tracing cello strains into a sorrow skein that circles and mingles and self-propagates. I listened to her. I watched her, too, watched her body spasm with the white slashes of her bow. I, like the street preacher girl, wondered about putting my finger on her, to break her transfiguration, to dissect by simple disruption the complex duality of enharmonic possession. 

Fifteen years ago, fifteen years from then, I thought I would be standing on a stage like the band that played tonight, night after night into the longest night. It was something I thought I knew would happen, but never did. I was fifteen and my heart sang starstricken dreams as I stood, arms uplifted, a player on a slumbering stage, and waited for the world. I thought I knew all things about time and god and love and death. The world never came to me; I went to it. I met people I wish I’d not. I became, briefly, whom I wished I had not. I learned about truth and life and love and other trite things that stubbornly resonate, like empty vessels under electric storms. And if there was one song, my song, it was crazy and dumb and young, and dreamt stages that glowed gold and dark. 

You could have asked me if I understood, then, what I would come to understand now, and I would have told you that I did, and not been able to do anything but tell that lie, without ever knowing why. That girl tugging down my shirt, baring my heart to the world, I couldn’t tell you now what at fifteen I would have done. I would have laughed. I should have laughed. I, now, would have reached out, put a finger on that unweary cheek, told you it was okay. And now I laugh.

Today the mirror says, look away from what is past, into dreams long-extirpated, into bliss, into a patient accretion of all that gentled you — that asks but what did you regret? and what did you expect? and I pause and say nothing, everything and briefly, I realise it is true.

And looking at the face I grew into, I shut my eyes and find myself finally able to say; yes, it was me. Yes, I am, I am, a different dream.

The sun on my skin, the wind in my hair, here it is — gold, in October, the honied homecoming scent, red cedar. And the song has changed, as all songs do. Or my ears have, or the world has, or all of us, or just me, and you.