i meet an old friend by chance on halloween. i had gone out to pick up last minute candy and a vintage sterling silver necklace i was having repaired at the family owned jewelry shop in the crappy dying mall where someone i used to know works. cue that gotye song or something.
my old friend taps me on the shoulder at the chain thrift shop we both like to go through. i was waiting in line to buy a tiny vintage gold ring and a pair of sterling silver toe rings just for the nostalgia. i’ve noticed my thrifting lately has been of a nostalgic variety. first it was the witchcraft books and tarot cards from my youth, and then, the sterling silver toe rings (one has dolphins and one has a scorpion – pure 90s cheese). my head canon is that some fabulous wiccan ‘goddess gurl’ gave up the ghost and all her things got donated to the thrift for the twisted up old biddies, bored fathers, and vintage resellers to paw through like wild animals setting upon a carcass. that sounds judgemental i guess, but it isn’t – i’m a hungry vulture just like the rest of them. i’m no better.
my friend is thrifting vintage jeans and a shirt for a guy she likes and asks me to coffee. i usually say no out of habit to random outings as my autistic ass prefers planning to spontaneity, but i’ve been trying to say yes more, to take risks more, to reach out more, and so i say yes. i’m surprised by how much i want it, too. now that i’ve quit concerts and events, and fully locked into weird alchemical hermit mode, i don’t go out too often, especially not on girls girl coffee dates. what next? a lululemon handbag and some protein coffee and a matching pastel workout set?
we sit in the coffee shop full of students and bitchy looking office girls with really expensive high heeled boots and shit-talk our city, the scene, life, and eventually, because we are girls, love.
lana del rey sang, “this is what makes us girls” and i think about that as we sip drinks and talk about boys we like, trying to convince ourselves that love is love is love is love, and even though she’s 40 and i’m almost 40, we sound a little bit like teenaged school girls with crushes.
the tea is hot and the gossip is scandalous and finally, she says it first, “we’re old”, and i agree with her, god, we are old. scene politics and drama, hot gossip about someone’s penis tattoo, family systems trauma therapy, is all mixed in with talk of punk rock and alternative music and aura photography and the big city. i picture us as we are there, beautiful, aged, tattooed girls with dark hair and nice clothes. we look like cool moms and she is, i’m not.
we laugh about people we know who try to rock stage clothes in real life and have to minister to younger and younger people in the dwindling group of people who think they’re cool in our city. must be tough to be a big fish in a small pond, i guess, even if you’re the big fish with the patchy pants, or the witchy hat, or poorly thought out face tattoos, or that one weird girlfriend no one likes, but is around for some reason anyways.
we talk about people who’ve died, something that is an inevitability amongst people who party hard and don’t know quite when the party is over. there’s been overdoses and suicides and mental illness, drug addiction, jail time, child abuse and worse. i think about that one time that GWAR covered that jim carroll band song “people who died”
they were all my friends, and they died
these are people who died, died
it was last year about this time that a friend of mine died. local punk, skilled musician, known him since high school kinda thing.
i watched people huff gasoline out of bags and do whippets outside of his “funeral” and i swore then, no more shows. no more of this bullshit. no one’s missed me yet, one of the benefits of never fitting in anywhere i went, anyways. an outsider even amongst the outsiders. story of my life tbh.
hopefully there will be a cool story of two about me floating around though. i always like hearing those. a shitty local metal band used to refer to me as the “weird religious girl” and talked about me like i was some kind of old money villain from a fucking VC Andrews novel (partially accurate) and that amused and still amuses me to no end. for a while people thought i was a witch (half accurate). for the longest time, i was just the crazy girl with angel wings and a bottle of wine screaming my way through every party (at least that one was accurate)
i tell my old friend about it, weirdly, because the funeral and the gasoline and the whippets upset me and we are shit talking anyways.
i say, “there’s no old timers league for punks” and she nods.
even as i say it, i don’t judge the people that didn’t get out in time, the ones in institutions or boxes or urns. i got out because i had to and i got out because i wanted better for myself but it wasn’t easy and it sucked and it was and still is shitty work that i have to choose to keep doing and i have to choose to keep on doing it, everyday.
i realize as we are chatting and i’m admiring how utterly and unmistakably beautiful my friend is, that i haven’t been to therapy in a while. after years of once a week intensive EMDR, i needed a break, and maybe i should go again. i can’t decide if i miss it, or not.
but the thing is, as i ponder this, i sit in a place of privilege, to mull over if i should continue my journey to keep getting better, to keep doing the work, to keep on keepin’ on. it’s hard and shitty and it costs like, a lot of money. it would be way easier to drive home and stop at the liquor store on my way and drink away the rage that still lives inside me, deep down. it would be easier to throw back some pills and dance all night and convince myself i was becoming “enlightened” and doing “the work”, rather than actually, you know, doing the work.
when i was 20 and had pink hair and a tongue piercing and dreadlocks and wore a crystal headband over my third eye and danced with my tits out and glitter on my sunburnt arms in fields and farmhouses, i was so convinced i was becoming closer to achieving godhead, nirvana, some kind of “truth”. i realize only now with my clinician’s eye that what i was actually doing was inhaling (amongst other things) a whole lot of copium.
i try to be gentle with myself about it. i didn’t know any better, really. but i wasn’t healing, i was coping, surviving.
i’m old now. lines on my face. skinnier and bony now because of medication and stress. my cool gray stripe of hair widens and i always debate if i could just rock one of those “money pieces” you know. i’ll have to ask my gen-Z coworker who matches her coat to her purse to her stanley cup. fuck she looks like a million bucks and i drag my sorry ass to work in comfortable shoes with special orthopedic insoles like a heavily tattooed grandma. i’ve forgone ‘cool’ clothes in place of soft cotton pieces and i can’t decide if that’s giving up or not. my friend is wearing a stylish sweater and loafers. comfortable, too.
but, she’s more beautiful than me. i’ve always thought that, even when we were just kids and she was a kid with a baby. we are just two ex-punks in the coffee shop, delighted to be screeching about sex and psychedelics and the state of the world.
but there’s no old timers league for punks. so, we became something else.
and i go home to tend to my blog and drink mint tea and lace myself into a pair of stays for halloween.
i only cried twice that day. that’s an improvement.
hospital vespers 