i was playing with the ‘random’ button on my blog and it brought me to a post from 2010 when i posted the song “heart skipped a beat” by the xx.
i lay in bed and played the song; closed my eyes and breathed deeply while i listened.
and before i knew it, i was that 17-year-old boy again, wandering the 2am streets of toronto, alone in the night and battling my demons. full to bursting with a kind of love i fought to stamp down, and even then, i had a sense that the world was somehow still full of possibility – the golden promise of my fleeting youth. that a life existed on the other side of my silly fight, and i would wake up, bruised and battered, to the light of a new day, somewhere far away from there. i just had to make it through.
i lay in bed and listened to the song and saw my younger self so clearly: wearing too-tight jeans and the oversized brown plaid shirt i stole from yodit that still hangs in my room today. lost and wandering in the cold comfort of the near-deserted night, aching in a lonely way but knowing it wouldn’t last forever. overthinking, always, caught in a tangled forest of my own competing wants. troubled to the point of a restlessness that pushed me into the yawning dark.
i miss how big everything felt back then, deep heartache but so alive, a kind of romantic masochism. i open my eyes and realize i’m crying. i take the oversized brown plaid shirt from its hook on the door and put it on. i think about all of the nights its seen me through, all of the times i’ve pulled it tight around me.
there’s a friend i miss from back home who would wander the streets with me, a saving grace pulling me from the mire. we don’t talk anymore, but i miss her, and i’ve always had faith that one day we’ll reconnect.
maybe next time i’m in toronto i’ll reach out to her. we can have a coffee and catch up on all the bygone, wasted years and maybe start to heal what’s broken, patch up all the little cracks. would that be weird, so out of the blue? would it be selfish? crossing a boundary?
i wonder if she misses getting lost together too.