about a boy

(i can forget about it 363 days out of the year, but at this time, in this season, with autumn coming on and the wind getting more brisk and the students returning to campus and me starting to actually feel my adult age... putting the memory aside is not an option. funny, though, how current events have coincided recently...the past will catch you up as you run faster, indeed.)

so two years have passed, right down to the day, and i kind of want to talk about it now. after all, i've since come to determine that on this night two years ago was when everything turned for me.

it's funny how one of the biggest things i've learned in the last five years is how time really changes everything. after a few years have passed, something that seems so all-consuming and important can become completely less so, friendships and relationships can totally change, and more often than not, things resolve in such mysterious ways that i really do believe - more than ever before - in the concept of fate, and things working out the way they're supposed to. time brings clarification, consolation, and if not finality then at least some acceptance. and so it really no longer matters to me if he reads this, or if she reads this (are congratulations in order, by the way? you tell me, sweetheart), or whoever. i'm just so past the point where i'd normally care, where i once cared so deeply that i wouldn't dare say a word. i had too much to protect, once upon a time.

but, because it makes a good story - and i always aim to make my life a story worth telling - and because enough time has passed, i want to talk about the two days in september 2005 that i spent in new york city.

i also want to share bits of the entry i wrote in my private diary the day after i arrived home from that trip, having left toronto knowing that everything would be different when i came back -- and i definitely wasn't wrong in my foresight. this bit is something i remember scribbling in a notebook while waiting on the departure bus out of nyc, to be later typed up and added into my diary:

"The best analogy I can come up with is the image of tossing a stone into a puddle, setting off ripples that just keep continuing to show an effect. I threw that stone on Thursday night, and it was a big one. I know I set a hell of a lot of things in motion, but I feel confident and in total control of everything I chose to do."

bang. fucking. on. two years now and those ripples are still going. (whether i'm still in control or not is a bone of contention by now, though.)

i guess i should start with what i remember the most. it was late wednesday night when i boarded the bus in toronto, excitedly clutching a greyhound ticket to new york city. i'd mentioned my trip here, but it was purposefully as a casual last-minute post. truthfully, the whole trip was pretty well a last-minute idea -- i'd only decided to go less than two weeks earlier. but hey, why the hell not -- one of my most beloved local indie bands was playing a label showcase for a music festival, along with two other canadian bands that i'd become a quick fan of over the summer. (looking back on it, 2005 had been a banner year for me; i'd done a lot of music writing, met and befriended many awesome musicians, and did a lot of coming into my own. true, there were plenty of trials by fire and a couple crazy emotional breakdowns, but i can't think of any other year where i experienced more or grew up more than 2005. it really set the blueprint for a lot of current things in my life, too.)

but there was also a third band, and they ended up becoming the main reason why i went. or, rather, it was a particular member of that band who'd had a crush on me ever since we'd met back in may of that year. i liked him, sure - although some of my friends argued that i was just using his slavering affections to make my recent ex (a member of the aformentioned beloved local band) jealous, and they weren't entirely wrong there - but i liked his invitation to spend my two planned days in new york city hanging out with him and his band even more. sounded like a rock n' roll adventure to me.

so there i was on the wednesday night, in my favourite place to be in the world (it still is, actually): sitting alone on a darkened coach bus, en route to the next big concert. all i'd brought to eat was an apple and sparse bits of soy trail mix (this was back when i was still starving myself thin, which isn't something i really like admitting to these days, but there you go), and i was only listening to two cds: a mix cd i'd burned a few days prior that opened with the bravery's "an honest mistake" (i was going to new york city, after all), and the suicidegirls: black heart retrospective compilation. even today, listening to anything from that album - especially the cult's "she sells sanctuary", bauhaus' "she's in parties", gene loves jezebel's "desire" or ministry's "every day is halloween" - will take me immediately back to that autumn bus ride through the midnight rain, all through new york state.

i remember it being dreary and foggy when we pulled into new york city thursday morning. it was humid, too; i was already sweaty and not looking too attractive after being on a bus from 11:15 at night to 11:05 the next morning. but i don't think any of that could have quelled my excitement at a) being on my first big solo band-following trip (into another country, omfg!), and b) being in america alone. i'm a whore for solo travel; i love experiencing concert trips with a best friend, sure, but if it's something as big an occasion as that new york city trip was, then i'll go it alone all the way. especially if it involves american travel. (one of my slightly guilty secrets is how much i fucking love the united states. i could never live there and being there for more than three days makes me feel weird, but i always jump at the chance to visit.)

well, i went it alone as far as getting off that bus at the station in nyc. from there, it was the boy, and his band, and the traffic jams, and the ridiculous excitement, and the shy flirtations, and the mass amounts of caffeine, and the music and laughter and stiletto heels as the suddenly-sunny afternoon turned into the glittering evening.

...this was a bastardized account of my night. really, don't bother with it. or, at least, read it but keep in mind - actually, always keep in mind when it comes to me writing about my life - that i am very, very skilled at selective truth-telling. i have never once lied in this blog, a fact which i'm pretty proud of, but i commonly choose what i will and will not write about. i never tell the whole story.

but i will say that to this day, not any single other night has shone so brightly in my memory. not any of my nights on tour last spring. not any of the nights on the brief tour in 2006. not any of my formative days as a teenager on the road, band-following with my friends. none of them.

why is that?

here's what i've since managed to figure out: see, when i first started following rock bands around the country seven years ago, it was as an escape. trying to find an exit hatch to another place, another reality, whatever, is something that i've always been searching for, ever since i was a kid engrossed in fictional and imaginary worlds. (i don't look for someone to save me; i look for somewhere to escape to, so i can save myself.)

and when i discovered rock bands - musicians being the closest real-life equivalent to fictional characters - i realized that they had their own world. it was all there; the cliche'd sex-drugs-rock-n-roll, but also a place of endless touring, backstage areas, debauchery, late nights, wild lives, no control. it wasn't "the real world" -- not boring old everyday-life reality. it wasn't normal or typical in any way. it was another place altogether (an old david posse friend and i dubbed it "the alternate universe"), inhabited by these crazy fucked-up individuals who happened to be rock stars, where they made the rules and just about anything was possible. i'd caught a few glimpses of the alternate universe when i was seventeen, and that had been my driving force ever since -- to get there.

and on that warm september night, when i was twenty-one years old, i'd actually attained it. i was right in that world, i was fucking living in it, that reality i'd been striving to get to since i was a young teenager, staring at my rock band posters and wanting so desperately to be where they were. exactly two years ago right now, in new york city, i was living the dream: getting drunk at a sweaty rock club, my fetish blouse unbuttoned and feeling brazenly attractive in my fishnets and knee-high boots, laughing as i sold my friends' band's albums and t-shirts, smoking outside and staring up at the hazy bright lights of the lower east side, chilling in the downstairs green room with the bands, weaving my way through the crowds, tossing back multiple shots of jagermeister with the musicians, and, most importantly, being seen by all as the girlfriend of one of the guys in the band. (of course i was not, but given the amount of pda we were openly engaged in at pretty much all times, nobody would have questioned it and neither he nor i would have denied it)

so this was my night of fangirl glory, what i can remember of it at least. this was my first time actually feeling like i belonged with them -- with the musicians whose company and acceptance i'd craved since i was a teenager. this was also the first night i formally met the members of a certain canadian punk band called the black halos, after having only communicated via myspace and a few written reviews and one amiable phone interview that led to an article and some scattered e-mail correspondence afterwards. i look back at the parts of my old diary entry where i briefly mentioned those black-clad boys in nyc - and, later, all across southern ontario in the fall - then look at the tattoo on my abdomen and just laugh. if only i'd known where that path would eventually lead. (as a testament to my mass amounts of imbibement on this particular occasion, adam still refers to the new york gig as "that night you were wasted")

and i won't lie -- a lot of it did have to do with the fact that i thought i'd finally found the musician who wanted me more than any of the other girls. (groupies. whatever.) that night was something else, indeed. there was a much-later aftermath to our affair, of course - one which would involve long-distance calls, lies, e-mails that became suspiciously sporadic, promises that proved false, stupid forgiveness on my part, lots of instant messaging, eroticism over the phone line, lies, my eventual first experience with going on the road with a band (no, last spring with the halos wasn't the first time), more lies, uncertainty, fading hope, and finally a spectacular flameout in which i told the boy to never contact me again - but the following day spent in nyc was one i remember as contented, if not also muggy and damp.

there were walks through central parks and holding hands on the streets of new york, being a cute rockstar couple. there was cheap dinner at a pub (i think i just had a corona, actually), being stuck in traffic, and him driving me through times square at 9 p.m. and grinning as i stuck my head out of the band van window to gaze at the neon lights in wonder. (i've always been a huge sucker for big cities at night.) there was him finally pulling away from the bus station at port authority, leaving me to catch the second bus home to toronto - i'd missed my first one because we couldn't find a place to park - while leaning my head against the window and writing these words in my notebook:

"I stared out the window at the passing lights of New York City with tears running down my face. But they weren't ALL sad, really; just like before, it was a lot of happiness and a lot of relief, and a lot of eagerness to see what's going to happen from here on. The stone I tossed into the puddle was a fucking huge one, and I have no doubt the ripple effect is going to hit more people than just us. More keenly than anything, I knew that something was just beginning, and for better or worse, I started something in New York City that would be another defining part of my life.

I don't know what this is. I don't know what this is going to be. I don't know what this CAN be, really. But this is something, and right now, that's enough for me. I want to be happy with just this.

I suppose time will tell where things go from here."

...two years down the line and the story, to me, is still fucking epic -- especially given how it started, how it played out and how it eventually ended, and how much everything changed because of those two days in new york city. how much everything is still changing, and how different things would be in my life right now if that adventure had never happened.

new york, a rock star, a hotel room, one impossible dream finally realized. although i did have to pay for it, in the end, although i still can't say i regret it -- because to me, trading a part of myself to him in exchange for entrance to that world - no matter how brief, no matter how much it damned me to make me always long to go back - was worth it.

...the one question he never failed to ask me repeatedly in the months that followed was, "do you regret it?"

no. i don't regret it. i didn't. i still don't.

i will hold my own story up to anyone who says that losing your virginity isn't a big deal.

[ music | fuel, "hemorrhage (in my hands)" ]