I have big emotions, and they live right on the surface.
The tantrums and crying fits of my childhood may look a bit different in adulthood– I don’t stomp up many stairs or slam a lot of doors these days– but the feelings behind my sobs are familiar. Am I doomed? My horoscope once said I was born to understand my own sadness. Not quite the hero's calling of, say, Odysseus, but fairly Herculean nonetheless. I tried describing how it feels to be sometimes. It’s like a big cement wall drops down in the middle of my brain. I can’t think about my dream life. I can’t think about a job search. I can’t understand my own sadness.
On the car ride home from Coachella with my friends, Kelsey and Annysela, we listened to Taylor Swift’s second album Fearless. Annysela’s request. Taylor has a song on there called “Fifteen” about not knowing at fifteen what you’ll know when you’re older, and how life can feel so big yet so small at the same time. We listened to “Taylor’s Version” (meaning re-recordings, which she started doing in 2019 after her former label sold her masters to Scooter Braun1). Taylor was probably eighteen when she first recorded the song, and around thirty when she re-recorded it.
Taylor sings, “ I've found time can heal most anything/ And you just might find who you're supposed to be/ I didn't know who I was supposed to be/ At fifteen.”
Jesus, Taylor! Now we know why she writes all those songs about betrayal. And by the way, how’d she even write this song when she was still just a teenager? I couldn’t stop thinking about all of this.
“I know it’s crazy,” Kelsey said. She swerved in and out of the fast lane, whispering under her breath about how stupid the drivers were.
“It’s making me cry. How sad and happy it is,” I said.
“It’s nostalgic,” she said.
“Oh yeah,” I said, remembering that nostalgia is just sadness and happiness all rolled into one thing. “We’re all just one thing,” Lady Gaga said during her Friday performance at Coachella. I felt then that nostalgia would haunt me for the rest of my life, since Kelsey was taking me home to a state she doesn’t live in, and I recently had dinner with a friend I don’t get to see often enough, and I’ve got polaroid pictures of people I don’t talk to anymore on my bedside table, and the song “Everything is Romantic” by Charli XCX keeps playing on a loop in my head—Fall in love again and again. Everything isssssss romantic!
I wonder if my sadness is connected to my creativity. Is it connected to Taylor and Charli? If everything is romantic then everything is sad. If everything is sad then everything is romantic. Oranges on the trees and on the ground.
They’d send me to the sea if this were the 18th century.
evil