I’m running down the beach with a girl who’s never seen the Atlantic. The sky is blue and unrelenting. Our hands burn with ice from where we dipped them in the waves. When the January wind blows, it bites hard into the droplets crystallizing on our fingertips. It’s your first time on the East Coast! I had told her. It’s a rite of passage. Only a few stragglers walk the boardwalk behind us, their hair blowing in a frenzy. She’s grinning as she stops and looks back at me, sifting through the sand to pick out the fragment of a shell. Sand sticks to her wet fingers like a second layer of skin. Something to remember this by. 

Later today, I will drop her off at the Newark airport. The place that’s seen me coming and going, and going, and going for my entire life. And I’ll want her to stay.

*

I first discovered the band Bleachers when I was fourteen. The band is fronted by Jack Antonoff: best known for producing culture-defining records like Lorde’s Melodrama and Taylor Swift’s 1989, but to me, best known for growing up about twenty minutes from where I did, and playing his first show in my hometown. At fourteen, I was drowning in the suburbs of North Jersey, dreaming of the day my life would get bigger. Dreaming, also, of the day I’d fall in love. More than anything, I felt out of place in my hometown, and on some level, I thought that being in love would make me fit somewhere. With someone. I thought I would finally feel awake.

And when I first heard Bleachers’ “Rollercoaster,” it overflowed with life. It was synth-filled and bright and loud and I could feel it in my chest. From the opening lines, it sucked me into a world where love was magnetic and tumultuous, fast and desperate: “It was summer when I saw your face / looked like a teenage runaway,” “We were shotgun lovers / I’m a shotgun running away,” “It’s a hundred miles an hour on a dirt road running away.” 

This is what I wanted. Something that would drive me sick. Something that would wake me up.

*

I am standing on a cliff with a girl who is falling in love with me.

Right now, I don’t know this, I’ll only learn it many months later. Right now, it is spring break of our freshman year and one of my closest friends is visiting me in New Jersey for a night. Right now, we stand at the overlook in West Orange where you can see the whole Manhattan skyline lit up glittery because, for most people, the best thing about New Jersey is New York. It’s how we got the nickname “the shadow of the city.” As we talk we both look forward as though made anonymous by the city ahead. And as we drive the Garden State Parkway home, I play her a song—“Wild Heart” by Bleachers, which opens with the line, “They closed the parkway late last night / and as I sat with the echoes of the lies that I told / I felt young, never changed by crooked hearts.” Say, The parkway! That’s where we are. Now you get it, this song is about New Jersey. 

A few months later, she tells me how she feels. And I’m happy, I think. Because she’s really important to me. But mainly all I feel is panic. I tell myself that’s how all big things are supposed to feel. Like I’m fighting myself to grab at them.

*

New Jersey has made me a lot of things. It made me loud, blunt, impatient. Yelling at people in my hometown driving barely under the speed limit. Passing dawdling people on the sidewalk and glaring back at them to prove a point. Falling in love. Impulsive and selfish. Doing everything at this frantic, jacked-up speed. Always running away from where I grew up, the way it made me feel small.

So when that girl, the one from the cliff, one of my best friends, asked me out—I felt crazy and sick and elated and scared. So I said yes.

I thought this was the right way to do things. That throwing myself headfirst into every endeavor, speeding through every moment and tearing through new places like a shot elastic, would finally put some distance between me and New Jersey. Would get me closer to my new life. And more than that, I craved feelings that were huge and all-consuming and drastic. I craved the glittering synth characteristic of Bleachers’ first two albums, which had soundtracked my adolescence in New Jersey and taught me that love should be reckless. Love should be huge and deafening. And in this way, I chased relationships that made me feel such intensely oscillating emotions, each day a pendulum swung from giddiness to agony. Love that was, as I first craved when I was fourteen, a rollercoaster. If it made me feel safe, secure, quiet, I had absolutely no interest in it.

*

I am twenty and that relationship is bleeding out and in eight days it will be over but right now it’s 11:59 p.m. on a Thursday in my sophomore-year dorm room. My hair is too long. It’s a bit too warm out to be March. It’s a bit too cold out to be March. And I am watching the clock on my phone, 11:59 p.m. stretching infinite, because in one minute Bleachers will release their fourth studio album, a self-titled work largely focusing on Jack Antonoff’s marriage to actress Margaret Qualley.

As I finish listening to the record at around one in the morning, I have the most traitorous, awful thought: I don’t like it.

This will nag at me for weeks. I loved the lyricism, but the production drove me crazy. The album was so quiet. So devoid of the loudness and passion and angst and youthfulness that defined their previous work. Instead of being about finding some crazy love or hope or chaos on the Garden State Parkway, which had appealed to me so profoundly as a teenager, suddenly it was about marriage. And being settled down. And this quiet, simple love. In “Ordinary Heaven,” Antonoff sings, “In ordinary heaven / you dance around the apartment / and I just get to be there… just getting to witness you.” My first thought: What if that ordinary heaven gets boring? My second thought: What if I want that ordinary heaven more than anything?

*

Five months later, I’ll move to Denmark, and about two months after that, I’ll meet a girl. She’ll leave her contact solution on my bathroom sink when she stays over and we’ll get cinnamon rolls together in the mornings. One day when I’m not feeling well, we sit together all afternoon talking and it might be my favorite day we’ve ever spent together. She makes me tea and orders us takeout. And I start to notice that when I’m with her, for the first time in my life, I don’t feel like I’m rushing ahead to the next moment when one or both of us moves on to the next place and the next person. I breathe easier. I breathe slower.

We leave Copenhagen in December and she comes to New Jersey in January. I take her to the place I grew up hiking. To the lakes that my friends and I drive circles around when we’ve got nothing else to do. I take her to all the touristy spots in New York City and she’s surprised that the Times Square ball is much smaller than it looks on television. I even suggest going to the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree though I’d never be caught dead there otherwise. And I take her to the Jersey Shore—the place that is so closely intertwined with everything that I am. Full of life and a bit ridiculous. And I think of another song by Bleachers and Bruce Springsteen, “Chinatown,” a song about bringing the person you love from New York City down to the Jersey Shore to show them who you are: “I’ll take you out of the city / honey, right into the shadow / because I want to find tomorrow.” 

I love being everything that New Jersey made me. Loud, blunt, impatient. Always in search of big feelings and new places. That didn’t change when I brought her to New Jersey. I still felt all kinds of huge things for her, all bright and glittery just like “Rollercoaster” has always been. But at the same time, suddenly, I had nothing to run from anymore. I felt like I had all the time in the world to wait around and find out what would happen next. “Chinatown” sings, “I want to find tomorrow.” I do too.