The feeling of finally being brave enough to attend the party you really wanted to go to…only to find everyone has gone. All that’s left is a dim and empty room with balloons sinking to the ground, half empty red solo cups, the muffled record skipping to a halt, streamers languishing off the walls, and the fan slowly rotating the stale air around a reddish room.
This is what it feels like to try to enter a fandom, to enjoy a passion fully that you couldn’t before when it was at its peak. Everyone has moved on… Well, most everyone. Perhaps, just maybe, the old guard has moved to the backyard, passing a joint between the three of them as they murmur in quiet voices about how crazy that party was and how hungover they will be in the morning. Hushed voices with curled smiles as they discuss the -good- shit - the stuff too intimate and real to share among the cacophony of a crowded room.
Is there room for one more? I brought some chips and some wild stories. I’ll just need a few puffs and some patience to prepare to bear my soul, rationality be damned.
I was there when it happened. I was! Young, timid, watching it catch fire and spin into the air. I didn’t have then what I have now. I was still turning into a person, and this thing - it shaped me into that person. To look back and see the charred lines from where I’ve been, all leading back to that one cigarette smoked and tossed into the bushes. The origin of yearning, what shaped my future fervors into the faces they hold now.
Is it too late? Too late to pay homage to my first loves? To declare the first loves as the eternal? To admit that, seething underneath my skin, deep in the folding of flesh and bone, it pulsed, bloody fuel for the beats of my heart?
I cannot go back, I can never go back. I cannot revive what is dead.
But what if it never died?
