It’s the middle of August, and we only just got here. Right now, our whole group is gathered in the basement of a bar that’s too bright on a street that we’ve never seen in the daylight. I’m holding a beer, although I don’t drink beer, and we’re all a little drunk on Moscow Mules that cost us 95 kroner apiece since we don’t know yet that 95 kroner is way too much to pay for a drink. The beer is sweating in my hands, and my hands are sweating. She’s got a dart pinched between her fingers, and she’s squinting at the dartboard across the room. We’re all egging her on, and we’re getting looks from the 50-somethings sitting around us, because what are a bunch of Americans doing here on a Sunday night? And then she lets the dart go, and it narrowly misses the bullseye, and we’re all cheering, and she’s beaming a smile I’ll soon become familiar with even though right now I barely know her name.
And as I’m standing here, looking at everyone, I hear a familiar opening, a murmur of chirps and buzzes, spill out from the speakers in the corner of the room. Then, a tone like a heartbeat, then synths, then drums, then “I’m feelin’ rough, I’m feelin’ raw, I’m in the prime of my life!” “Time to Pretend” by MGMT. And as the song starts to reverberate through me, like it always does, I feel open and strange, like anything could happen, here on the other side of the ocean. So I want to cling to this moment, sink my fingernails into it, press rewind, and start it all over again. I can imagine what it’ll be like to remember this, “Time to Pretend” overlaid upon hazy memories of a bar that I never went back to and people I never spoke to again, even as I am living it.
***
I first discovered the synth-pop duo MGMT—specifically, their song “Kids”—when I was a freshman in high school. “Kids,” which begins with a countdown shouted through the din of screaming children before the thumping synth kicks in, is MGMT’s nostalgic reflection on the innocence and glory of youth as they prepare for college graduation and face a world filled with exploitation and degradation. Similarly, “Time to Pretend” is the pair’s mediation on how stardom might transform their lives and take them away from all of the simple joys and comforts of youth, instead presenting them with the gritty loss of innocence that comes with maturity and fame. Both of these songs come from their debut studio album, Oracular Spectacular, which was released in 2007 and performed by MGMT at Brown’s Spring Weekend in 2010.
When I first heard “Kids,” it leveled me. Although I was only 14, I was immediately struck with the sickening sense of loss that I felt when thinking about the past, an all-too-familiar longing for the simple moments that used to feel big. The opening lines—“You were a child, crawling on your knees toward it”—filled me with something like grief. I wanted to be a kid again, crawling toward everything, nothing behind me to look back at.
*
Often, I feel as though I can’t be trusted with memory. There are trash bags and cabinets in my childhood bedroom stuffed with shrapnel from people I don’t know anymore: a strip of shiny magenta tinsel, photo booth reels from sweet 16 parties, a pair of sparkly green earrings thrifted in Twentynine Palms. There are boxes in my closet with lids that won’t close, bursting with birthday cards from old friends that I haven’t talked to since I was 14. My walls are covered with pieces of the past: my ticket to see Love, Simon in eighth grade, my ticket from the first time I visited my best friend in San Diego, my ticket for a boygenius merch raffle at a listening party for the record (which I didn’t win). Countless scraps of memory for me to pick up and hold and ache over and long for and want back, even when the reality of it all was much less rosy than the feeling of missing it. For me, nostalgia has always felt a lot like self-sabotage: I crave the nauseous pain of it.
*
It’s the middle of May, and we’ve been here forever. After two months of lockdown, New Jersey is finally thawing, and now the four of us sit six feet apart, cross-legged in the middle of the darkening street. The humidity is so thick that the pavement smells sweet. We’re talking about the usual things: the boys we’re talking to, our summer jobs, what we’ll do when we get our licenses, what we’ll do once we graduate. The same things everyone talks about when you’re 16ish. The street is warm and rough under my palms. Mady suggests we go for a walk.
So we’re walking, chatting, skipping. Then, almost out of nowhere, a hot gust of wind breathes through the trees, and huge droplets of rain splatter against our bare arms and pool into the soles of our sneakers. And we take off running. And as I’m running against the torrent of rain next to the three of them, I’m swiping through the droplets beading across the screen of my phone, and now I’ve got “Time to Pretend” crackling through the waterlogged speakers. And we’re running, and my shoes slip against the rain-slick road, and I feel real, and awake, rough and raw. I feel like I am spilling over. I can imagine what it’ll be like to remember it, “Time to Pretend” overlaid upon hazy memories of the street Mady doesn’t live on anymore and a group of friends that splintered, even as I am living it.
*
Often, I feel as though I can’t be trusted with memory. I reread old journal entries till I know them by heart, and my voicemail is perpetually full of messages I can’t bear to delete. And each time I go back over it all, revisit each scrap of memory until I feel an ephemeral gasp of the specific way that October or that August felt, almost grasping it but never quite, I hate how much it hurts to remember even the things that were so good.
When I listen to “Kids” and “Time to Pretend,” I wonder how MGMT could so perfectly capture the way memory feels: persistent and beating, vast and important. In “Time to Pretend,” they sing, “I’ll miss the playgrounds and the animals and diggin’ up worms / I’ll miss the comfort of my mother and the weight of the world / I’ll miss my sister, miss my father, miss my dog and my home / Yeah, I’ll miss the boredom and the freedom and the time spent alone.” To MGMT, memory and loss are innately intertwined, viscous and intangible like syrup slipping through the prongs of a fork.
Likewise, in “Kids,” we’re told, “The memories fade, like lookin’ through a fogged mirror / Decisions to decisions are made and not bought / But I thought this wouldn’t hurt a lot, I guess not.”
*
But then I think back on all of the moments that MGMT has soundtracked my life over the past seven years. Some of them are clear and concrete, like that first night out in Copenhagen, or the night on Mady’s street in the rain. Others are much more nebulous, vague, and fleeting: sitting on a picnic bench and turning my face to the sun. Watching the glittering skyline of the city come into view after takeoff. Walking through campus as the magnolias started to bloom. And it’s true—I miss all of these moments and feelings and experiences, the same way that MGMT misses playgrounds, animals, and digging up worms. I miss the way their songs feel even when I’m still listening to them. But it’s a different kind of missing—it’s a good ache. It makes me remember to take the time to seek out everything worth missing. To be present in the moments that I’ll look back on without anticipating how much it’ll hurt when they’re over. To feel the sun on my face. Maybe sit on the swings. Maybe keep an eye out for earthworms.
