I Want Love like Dinner in America

I want love like Dinner in America.

I want love like remembering how much I love myself. Like being 13 years old reading band imagines about pop punkers and thinking one day someone would worship my strange, lilting poems and wish they were me. I want love like tour bus sex, like bras thrown onstage with instagram handles scribbled on the bands, like flashing lights and screaming at the top of my lungs. I want to feel hollow with ringing ears when love is done with me.

When I feel really, truly happy, I take a picture of it with my brain.

I’m thirteen and we’re on the mezzanine of the Fox Theater and Mea is holding my hand. She looks gorgeous, blonde hair illuminated by inconsistent strobe lights as we scream along to Florence + the Machine. Click.

It’s my seventeenth birthday and I’m on the edge of the mosh pit with Jade and Kaylin as the Wonder Years plays “I Just Want to Sell Out My Funeral.” Click.

Andrew stands behind me with his arms around my stomach as I scream the opening cadence to “Two Beers In” by Free Throw. I’ve never been high like this. Fridge is next to us, screaming along. It’s the three of us against the crowd, a chain of held hands as we battle our way up to the stage in time for Knucklepuck’s set, Andrew feeding me weed and little sips of the Trulys we snuck in through the employee door. He has two cans in his back pockets, as do Fridge and I.

At the end of the night, Andrew drunk drives us home and we eat Taco Bell silently in the kitchen of my sparse, two bedroom apartment. We’re all too tired and high to speak.

It doesn’t matter that Andrew doesn’t love me back. It doesn’t matter that in a month, I’ll move out of state and we’ll never speak again. That’s not the point of love, and just for the night, I’m surrounded by friends. Click.

If you love someone, you should say it. That is what I was taught. What if you die tomorrow and they never know?

I love Saturday mornings and green tea and chicken lemon rice soup and peanut butter Snickers and none of that can love me back. So why should it matter if Andrew never did?

But music loves me back.

Music is poetry I can feel in my stomach, line arrays pumping double bass that resonates in my feet, makes my fingertips tingle and my ears spark and fizz. Music is made of big, loud, unapologetic hearts like mine that ache for kindness in cruel places, voices that shout because they’re desperate to be heard. Documentations of pain they don’t know what to do with. Reminders that softness exists amongst the rubble.

And if this Frankensteinian coagulation of broken hearts, slit wrists, crashed cars, and love letters can be tender and generous with my heart, why can’t a person?

I want love like Dinner in America. I want music that loves me back. I want Simon crying when he hears Patty sing. I want to be loved so hard that I love myself again. I want to show my cracks, my spiders, my crooked symphonies, my desperations, and know that they’re not going to disappear. I want ecstasy without the agony, two people fighting to keep each other safe from the vicious machinations of this life.

I want to feel hollow with ringing ears when love is done with me.