up on melancholy hill
beaded curtain gut punch from section 104
I have been working diligently on a detailed review of and reflection on the Strokes’ newest album (which never fear will be finished and posted) but was completely derailed by having seen Hilary Duff live this week. This is my effort to claw myself out of the nostalgia spiral that ensued.
Just the day before this show, I had tagged along on a lunch date with my parents and two of their closest friends — she and my mom met working as nurses, and she was present at mine and all three of my siblings’ births, and he with my dad (also Matt) found a kindred camaraderie over the years in their quieter conversations. Anyway, I had been thinking of them already because Kat and I had a long standing date to see Hilary Duff at Madison Square Garden the following day. I remember as a young kid hanging out with their daughter, Lauren, in her (own!) room, fitted with incredible things like a CD player, and listening to Metamorphosis, songs I would have stuck in my head over the next 20 years. I remember wishing I could take the music home and listen to the songs whenever I wanted.
This distinct memory is always followed by another, where I’m sitting on my bed in 2006 with my Limited Too portable CD player having just come home from Borders and spending my gift card on Vanessa Hudgens’ V and the Hannah Montana soundtrack. I heard the music in my headphones and couldn’t believe no one else in the room could hear it.
On Thursday afternoon, I was at the beauty shop thinking about buying the rainbow butterfly clips for my hair but didn’t, thinking I’m too old for that. Imagine then how stupid I felt hours later at Madison Square Garden, surrounded by my kin wearing the early 2000s outfits of my dreams. Kat and I took our seats and scanned a QR code to “leave Hilary a message.” To my right in Section 104 my best friend types I see myself as a child when I see you and I have to look away.
(Whenever I see a live act it always trips me out. Not that anyone cares but I DO remember the moment One Direction came out at the IZOD Center in 2012 and had the deeply unsettling feeling that they too had bodies as flimsy and corporeal as mine. But I digress:)
Seeing Hilary Duff onstage, I realized the truth in all her lyrics — even a woman so beautiful it hurts to look at can imagine the worst over and over again. I hear myself in “Holiday Party” as she imagines in detail transgressions from loyal lovers, in “Future Tripping” as she spirals into everything that hasn’t happened yet, but will:
"2028 will you skip the headache
and settle somewhere out of state with a younger heart
Will your crisis be a car, or some bitch at a bar
who’s saying she loves Bon Iver (calls him Bon Ivar)" At one point Hilary’s daughters came out and they sat together eating pizza, a clear indicator from Hilary that despite her (and undoubtedly our) drastically different lives now, we can still all gather together and do both, have both. Or maybe that’s just what I received from Section 104.
Kat cried during her favorite song, everything meaning triply more to us now. I was okay until “Adult Size Medium,” when the fever pitch of nostalgia and remembrance comes
I remember everything and nothing at all
I'm waking up in a dream sequence
Sometimes I can’t see me in it
Was any of it worth it after all?
Is my reflection someone else’s I stole?
But if it’s mine, can I still keep it -
if i can’t see me in it? And nobody runs faster than time — the set list moves on but I stay right here, through “What Dreams Are Made Of,” through the balloons, the pink confetti, the return to real life, the subway home, the days that follow, I feel something far beyond the usual post-concert depression, crushed by exactly everything that she said: remembering it all, remembering nothing, finding myself sentient in a crowd of thousands as an adult older than I really ever thought about from inside that room, beyond the beaded curtain, headphones in the lime green music player knowing exactly what track would be on next because I never shuffled, and still after all these years remembering which 00:02-00.00 bleeds into the next 00.00.-00.02 and staying right there.
To have dreamed so much and so hard of the big world only to try at every turn to come back to that exact moment between the songs. It was with 20,000 others that we were girls again all together, for a moment outrunning that demon time. I felt it, and remember it all: the plush carpet, the beaded curtain, the Bermuda shorts, the Juicy Couture bag, the straightened bangs and side ponytails, the braces, the tied T-shirts, the multi-tap texting, the ankle socks, the curly handwriting, the posters, the dreams upon dreams upon dreams I had to make it, to be somebody exactly like who I am, to be where I am, here right now.
