TW: substance abuse
In the spring of my sophomore year, I sat at my desk in an empty triple and listened to a live performance of “Worms” by Boston-based band Pile on repeat. It’s the first track on A Hairshirt of Purpose, yet it doesn’t set the tone for the album. Its slow and gut-wrenching delivery is a far cry from the drum-and-bass-heavy rock of the other tracks. It’s the only song from the album that I listen to.
I could feel my bones corrode, my skin melt, my muscles atrophy. I was oversleeping and undereating and ignoring weeks of overdue assignments. The mascara I was wearing would stay on my face for another three days. Weeks of feeling horrible without knowing why went by. My journal went untouched.
“Worms” became my fourth most-listened-to song of the year. The soft yet metallic chime of the guitar is still burned in my mind. A couple hundred plays later, and I still have no idea what the words mean.
Even so, shadows of experiences I’ve had and people I’ve known flashed across the backdrop of my mind as I listened. Like catching a glimpse of something that reminds you of the dream you had last night—but you’re not really sure how, and you’re not really sure what you dreamt about. I caught brief glimpses of the past without knowing why. Pain of a sort I hadn’t felt in four years bubbled in my chest. I felt stupid and pathetic and like all my life’s muck and grime was stuck in place no matter how hard I scrubbed, no matter how hot the shower was. I heard the guitar again. My head hurt.
I sometimes conduct a case study on my own emotions. I’m trying to get a step ahead of myself, to fast-forward the development of my prefrontal cortex, to understand myself through strict analysis. Why do you feel this way? Is it because of the events of May 25, 2019? Why haven’t you fixed it yet?
In some cases, this served me well. I know that I can be neurotic and defensive and judgmental. I know what I expect of others and what I expect from myself. I know how much time I need to spend alone in a day. I know myself. But I don’t know myself purely through existence—I know myself because I’m constantly living inside my own head. I stare at walls at parties, going through every possible factor to figure out why I want to leave. I take long walks in unfamiliar places and try to put a name to how I’m feeling until all I can think about is the pain pulsing in my knees. I can’t feel without intellectualizing. I can’t just feel.
And so I crave nonsense, something that doesn’t warrant understanding. I sit on my phone and stop scrolling at the sight of a .png image of a brick with the words, “we r ALL TRAPPED in the SAME body.” I don’t know what it means. I love it. At museums, I walk up to the pieces I don’t understand. A spread of pastel durags on an 8x9 wooden panel. Blurry blocks of pink and orange by Rothko in a white-walled corner. “I like this one,” I say to whoever is next to me. I don’t pretend to know what the artist is trying to say anymore. I listen to music constantly, searching for something other than myself to dissect. No matter how long I listen, I simply don’t get it. I don’t need to. I’m not supposed to.
I lay down and listen to “Worms.” Rick Maguire’s voice flows into a cracked, invested pain and ebbs back into low tenderness: acceptance. I let the shadows walk by and I try to focus on them, but I don’t need to look too hard or speak to them. I only need to know they’re there.
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“I would never dream of blaming it on you / so please don’t ask me to stay / any longer, anymore.”
In the host’s bedroom at a party, a friend told me about her love life.
“Do you, like, really like him?” I asked her. “It’s okay if you do.”
She didn’t give me a very clear answer. Her hesitation and the softness with which she spoke about him meant yes. “I just think I should end it before it gets too bad,” she responded. “Before it gets to be too much.”
My heart ached for her. For the next week, every time I thought about it, I wanted to cry. I wanted to tell her I’d felt the same way, but I couldn’t quite grasp exactly how she’d felt, and I couldn’t grasp how I’d felt. Something beyond pathetic and beyond hurt. Something without words. I stopped thinking there.
+++
“An odd but deep calm washes over me / And from this distance I take in the heat / from the glow / from your burning skin.”
The summer before Brown, I worked full time at a deli in my town. It’s a small business that, in the summertime, is essentially run by drug dealers and 20-year-old girls. I was never very close with a lot of people in high school, so by the end of the summer, I spent most of my free time with my coworkers. By the time I left for Brown, one of them had become one of my closest friends. We sat in cars and swam in lakes for hours on end, and she updated me on the men she’d met at parties.
My first semester, she overdosed three times: once on cocaine, twice on Wellbutrin. I only knew about it through weekly text updates, and only one of my friends at school knew. I haven’t seen her in a few years. I don’t think I’ll ever give back her copy of her favorite book. I’m not completely sure if she’s still alive.
Her shadow passes me by.
+++
“It was never supposed to happen to worms like you / to worms like you.”
When I was in high school, a baby deer broke its back in the woods behind my house. It stayed there for three days, my family supplying it with water. We called the three closest animal rescue organizations in the area (none of which were closer than 45 minutes away) to no answer. Around 9 p.m. on the third day, I looked out to the front yard and saw a doe chasing a coyote in circles. An old couple driving home stopped their car in the middle of the road where the coyote had dragged the fawn. They talked to our neighbors and my mother before driving on. Five minutes later, when they returned, I hid in the basement and blared music through my single working AirPod to avoid hearing the gunshot.
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Watching Rick Maguire’s live performance, my chest tightens as he sighs and wipes his mouth at the end of the video. The emotion in the presence and the absence of his voice makes it hard to breathe. I run my hands through my hair and dig my nails into my scalp. I feel the song in my stomach and my neck and behind my ears. I feel it to the point of tears. I feel it, and I can’t really tell you why.
