 Teen angst, as we all know, can be a strange thing.
When I was 15, I lost a close friend and my grandfather in the same year. The former was due to a freak accident; failing health claimed the latter. Logic prevailed when it came to understanding and coping with my grandfather's death. But when it came to trying to come to grips with my friend Meredith's death, I directed my anger elsewhere -- partially toward one of her favorite artists, that dark canonized saint of goth kids everywhere, Morrissey.
Though utterly absurd, it made sense in a twisted way. We'd pored over Smiths tapes together at her house and watched Moz over and over on an old episode of Saturday Night Live off a pieced-together videotape she had made. We often talked about what we were going to do once we graduated. She wanted to move to New York and study fashion and I wanted to relocate there and become a writer. I had no doubt either of us would get there -- though in my mind, it was always together. And those songs were our anthems, our peculiar impetus for what we believed would be our eventual flight out of suburban Houston, not the dark hymns that they likely seemed to be to outsiders.
Meredith was visiting relatives in the Midwest when I got the call from a classmate. Meredith is dead, Ann-Marie told me. I remember sitting on the floor of my room, holding the phone and asking if she was sure. Was it just a rumor?, I pleaded. Maybe she's in the hospital, I said, and the information just got twisted.
Of course, real-life Lazarus stories are rare.
In the months following that surreal day, the songs somehow turned against me. Far from being aural keepsakes or even wistful reminders of her life, they became souvenirs of her death -- simply morose songs sung by a dour man. And nothing in my 15-year-old self could be convinced otherwise. I spent a lot of those dark days in my room, pretending to study but refusing to seek out the help I needed to come to grips with everything that happened. I threw heavy objects on the floor of my bedroom on the second story, hoping that my mother would come up and see what was wrong. This, incredibly, was my coping mechanism. Meanwhile, the music we had shared, I told myself, just fueled the internal fire I kept trying to put out -- like a snake eating its own tail.
I buried it as far as I could. All of it.
Years later the reality of the situation hadn't gone away. And Morrissey, always in my musical peripheral vision, had kept making music (of course). I resented him for it. Resented the fact that he was alive to pursue his passion, be enormously successful and then had the gall to be grim about it.
I moved to New York City in 2003 to pursue a career as a writer. There were always little things -- the jobs, the boys, and just the general intoxication of living here -- I wished she was around to tell. She would have thrived on the vivacity of the town, I thought. But I told myself it was a long time ago and instead tried my ridiculous (but longtime) coping tactic of trying to avoid thinking about it.
One day, a new Morrissey track came on my Internet radio station at work. I quickly moved to change it-- old habits die hard -- but first heard this:
"Leaving the one true free life born
I once thought I had numerous reasons to cry
And I did, but I donīt anymore
Because I am born, born, born
At last I am born..."
Of course, it would be a better story to say I had an immediate catharsis, a sudden realization upon hearing those words, but it wasn't quite that way-- it was just more of a slow burn as I allowed myself to get reacquainted with something new that I had very deliberately forgotten.
I finally saw Morrissey play the Hammerstein Ballroom in October 2007. I've seen hundreds of shows, but he blew me away that night, captivating and coy without any of the haughtiness I'd long assumed. And the crowd, all adoring disciples bowing at the Moz altar, were at least as engaging as the onstage show -- crying, heaving and clawing at their collective hair as though the second coming of The Beatles was taking place right in front of them. I could only watch and marvel, somehow humbled, more than a decade later in NYC, at life finally coming full circle.
Somewhere, I think Meredith would have strongly approved.
Stephanie R. Myers is a writer living in Park Slope, Brooklyn. She is also a staff writer for the music magazine The Deli.
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