I failed.
The sun was shining that day, but I didn’t feel it. All I felt was the wind whipping around me, raising the hair on my arms, as I walked out of the Administration building on the northernmost part of campus. All I felt were the shudders that ran through my body, the weight of academia sluffing off my shoulders and falling to the ground like rocks. All I felt was the winding up of my muscles, pulling tight and anxious over my bones.
All I felt was dumbstruck.
I had failed half my classes. I’d forgotten homework and missed tests. I’d failed my professors. I’d sparked hope with the occasional intelligent comment and well written essay only to crush it underfoot. I’d failed every teacher who had ever vouched for or believe in me. I’d promised them I could do it, that I’d finish the game, only to take a concussive blow with less than fifteen minutes on the clock. I’d failed my parents. I was spitting in the face of their sacrifices, their hopes, and their love. I’d failed thousands of dollars, years of planning and every dream I’d ever had. I’d asked for understanding and forgiveness only to exploit it for nothing, and now I was sitting on the edge of a cliff, banished, and searching for a new home.
That was what the meeting I was leaving had been about. I was being put on Academic Probation for my unsatisfactory grades. Or I would’ve been, if I hadn’t decided to pull the plug on the whole operation.
Because I’d failed.
And now, at the prompting of an academic advisor, and a feeling deep in my gut, I was dropping out of college.
My head was spinning as I walked back to my car, clutching the little paper that would allow me to sell my books back before the end of the semester. I wished I felt relief.
I’d been fighting for months, fighting not to succeed, not to thrive, but simply to stand, and that fight was over now. I wanted to celebrate that. But I didn’t feel like celebrating, I didn’t even feel better. I felt anxious, and as I walked to my car I nursed that anxiety into a healthy panic.
I still had to call my mom.
I know I listened to music on my drive home from campus, but I don’t remember what it was. I just remember feeling tight.
I called her almost immediately after getting home, willing myself to rip off the Band-Aid for the sake of being done. I wanted out of school, out of Provo, out of my head, and the sooner I called her the sooner it could all be finished. The sooner I could feel relief.
I don’t know what I expected, but I should’ve expected what I got.
My mom doesn’t freak out. She does not, as Austen would say, suffer nervous complaints. She takes in information in like a pancake soaks up syrup. And pancakes can always do with more syrup.
“How long have you been feeling this way?”
“A while. I barely made it to Christmas break. I um… well I got so bad I had an emergency session with my therapist. And Emily had to… babysit me for twenty-four hours.”
“…And when was this?”
“Just before Christmas break.”
“Why’d Emily have to babysit you?”
“I was um… I was looking up how much of certain medications you had to take for it to be, you know, fatal.”
“… I wish you’d told me.”
“I didn’t want to worry you.”
She didn’t criticize me for the money lost or the reckless wasting of life and time. She didn’t call me a failure or disappointment. She only asked me what I wanted to do next.
I wanted to go home.
And she thought that was a halfway decent idea.
Right after sending me off to college my family decided to first, buy a trampoline, and second take in a foreign exchange student, Franz. I will never forgive them for the trampoline, but I liked Franz. Franz was a funny, warm, polite, Catholic, Filipino boy who pronounced “cute,” “coot” because he knew it made me laugh. And my mom wanted him to see as much of the country as possible. So, she’d planned a trip for that spring break that would take her, my brother Kai, and Franz from our home in Michigan down to Missouri, over to Arizona, up through Utah’s many scenic hotspots, and then to the I-80 for a straight shot home.
Now that I was a drop out, I was part of this plan.
My aunt Ginger lives in Arizona, and that was where they planned to stop a few days and rejuvenate. My parents decided that rather than pick me up when they got to my neck of the woods that I would probably benefit from a scenic byway, and that flights from Provo to Phoenix were cheap enough to justify one.
My friend Mereht drove me to the airport the day I left. I know I pulled out my phone and listened to music on the airplane, but I don’t remember what it was, or if it helped me feel anything other than tight.
I don’t like plane rides. They make me anxious. I lock up, clench my jaw, my fists, my toes, all of it. My entire body is stiff and sore by the time the damn bird touches down. So I was exhausted when I arrived in Arizona.
But it was the warm kind of sunny there, and that was nice. And my family was there, and that was nice. I don’t know how much they knew. I don’t know if Kai knew that only three months before I’d almost tossed an entire bottle of Xanax down my throat or if Korana, my sister, whose travel plans were even more convoluted then mine, had any idea how many nights I’d stayed up itchy and anxious, and how many days I spent trying to sleep away the memory.
They never asked questions, and I didn’t feel like giving gratuitous answers.
We spent a couple days in Phoenix, my mom and aunt planning a group excursion to the Grand Canyon, and while we were loafing around their house, feeding my cousin’s snake and playing FIFA, Talmage and Kai, cousins born a month apart and thus, bonded for life, were singing. That year Fall Out Boy had released a new album, American Beauty/American Psycho, and Kai loved it so much he’d bought it. The two of them were obsessed, playing it over and over again, singing it at one another in an otherwise sensible moment. Luckily, it wasn’t just the one CD on rotation. Talmage owned Fall Out Boy’s earlier album, Save Rock and Roll, and the boys were obsessed with it too. They ripped each other copies, and both albums ended up in our van’s CD changer.
At the time I didn’t care much about Fall Out Boy, in fact I nearly disliked them. I liked a few of their songs but I thought their lyrics were nonsensical and that the lead singer couldn’t enunciate for shit. I was not looking forward to the guaranteed hours I would spend listening to this newly acquired CD on the drive home.
Then we were off.
I remember a lot from that trip, more than I remember from my entire Freshman year at BYU. I remember Talmage crouching in front of the canal at Montezuma’s Well, dipping his hands in the water and singing “El Dorado!” before bringing it to his lips and drinking. I remember Kai and Talmage pressed up against the guard rails at the Grand Canyon like Rose and Jack in Titanic, screaming “I’m King of the World!” I remember Kai, Franz and Talmage sitting at the edge of an outcropping that hung over the canyon like it was nothing and the anxiety that pulsed through me. I remember staying in the car at Hoover Dam, refusing to face the wind and the height of the recently completed bridge that took you much too far from the water. I remember insisting that we hike the Queen’s Garden at Bryce Canyon just because I love the name. I remember stumbling into the Hollow Mountain Gas Station in Hanksville and refilling our 42 oz sodas, bitter that the Shell down the street hadn’t allowed us to do the same. I remember Franz’s selfie stick and stealing my mom’s jacket. I remember the easy hike through Zion, and the lingering snow in Bryce Canyon. I remember playing with the Goblins in their Valley at sunset.
But what I remember most of all was the music.
We listened to Save Rock and Roll at least fifty times on that trip, and it colored everything. The lyrics are burned in my memory, with the sound of Kai and Talmage singing along.
“And I said ’I’ll check in tomorrow if I don’t wake up dead.’ This is the road to ruin, and we’re starting at the end.”
My legs started to itch and my face got hot. I’d heard this song once before, New Year’s Eve my Senior year of High School. I’d been driving the backroads of our town, I don’t remember why, but I took the long way and in the fading light of day it’d played on the radio.
I’d really liked it, even then. But that wasn’t surprising. It was a love song. And it was a love song for people like me.
I put my feet up on the dash. Where else was there to go, when you were at the end of the road to ruin?
Back?
“My old aches become new again, my old friends become exes again”
I crossed my arms over my chest. I had those. I had old aches, I had old friends, and memory had taken them and made them something new, something sad. Memory was fickle like that, refusing to let things lie and be what they were, what they should’ve been.
Some wounds never really healed right, and memory liked to reopen them.
“Anything you say can and will be held against you. So only say my name.”
I smirked. “Man,” I muttered, “that’s a line.”
My mom rolled her eyes. “Yeah, no kidding.”
“Sometimes before it gets better the darkness gets bigger, the person that you’d take a bullet for is behind the trigger”
Talmage and Kai held their fingers like guns, aimed at one another and fired, collapsing back into their seats. I rolled my eyes. Then they sat up.
“Isn’t that a great line though?” Kai said, brushing his hand through his hair. “Like it’s so good. ‘Cuz it’s true.”
Talmage and Franz bobbed their heads, “Yeah,” “So dope.”
And I nodded silently. There was a reason law enforcement always investigated spouses, best friends, and family when someone showed up dead.
I scratched my shoulder, thinking of the open wound, the one that was flared new whenever it was grazed and turned memories sour. The wound that left me yearning for the days love had been more than the memory of ringing in my ears.
The days when the darkness hadn’t been so big.
“But we are alive! Here in Death Valley.”
I listened as my brother tried to explain the album length music video The Youngblood Chronicles – “So this song plays after Patrick has just killed Joe and he’s in hell—”
“Wait, I thought Courtney Love was the one trying to kill them.”
“Yeah, she made Patrick evil.”
“And he’s in hell?”
“Joe’s in hell.”
“… And Elton John is God?”
“Come on Mylles!” Talmage laughed, “Keep up!”
“We will teach you how to make boys next door out of assholes!”
“BUTTHOLES!” Kai and Talmage screamed, trying to cover up the word.
I laughed, clapping my hands.
“Ugh,” my mom shook her head. “I hate that word. It’s disgusting. I don’t want to think about that. Why would I want to think about that?”
“You’re taking it too literally.”
“That’s what it means!”
That was my favorite line. I wanted someone to teach me that. How did you make a boy next door out of an asshole? Or, if that wasn’t possible, could I be a young volcano? Could I be wild and beautiful?
“Are you ready for another bad poem?”
I don’t know man, I thought, tapping my finger to the beat, these have been some pretty solid poems by my standards.
And that’s what they were, poems. They weren’t meant to be understood on their first read through. They were convoluted and wordy, constructed on intentional phrases and loaded wordplay. You had to listen line for line, and piece it together after, stringing a theme through seemingly disjointed pieces.
I had never been good at poetry, but I liked it.
“You are what you love, not who loves you. In a world full of the word yes, I’m here to scream… no!”
I was hunched forward in the front seat, listening intently and watching the scenery as it crawled by, when a chill shot up my spine. I’d never heard that before. But it wasn’t clean. It felt right but it didn’t quite make sense at first. And it was defiant, and almost mean. But good things love me. Good people love me. I thought. Why can’t I be defined by the things that love me?
It took me all of two seconds to remember why.
My boss thought I was a good worker, and my coworkers thought I was funny. My friend Mereht thought I was levelheaded, and my friend Emily thought I was ridiculous. My Creative Writing teacher thought I was a boring writer, and my Film 101 TA thought I was brilliant. “You know Mylles,” he said to me, the day I asked for extensions on my weekly write ups, “you’re honestly, like, the last person I would expect. You’re just so great in lab and you have awesome comments…”
The people who love you don’t always know you, so how can they define you?
But you don’t have to know a thing to love it. Not really. You can love something for very little. You can love pigs because they’re pink, or owls because they have big eyes. You don’t need good reasons to love something, the choice to love it is reason enough. Hell, your choice to love at all, says something. It says something of your values, your desires, your disposition. And that’s what matters, the definition of you. Who you are – the make of you. What matters is what you love. And you can choose to love something that’s good for you.
I stared out the window as we rounded a bend of red rock and decided that I may not love it yet, but I wanted to love being alive. Then, surely, I would actually be alive. I wanted to love the sun on my skin and the air in my lungs. I wanted Christmas to be magic and to feel like I belonged in my body. I wanted to mean it when I smiled and to feel worthy of sleeping on a bed rather than a couch. And, more than anything, I wanted to fall in love again – to feel giddy and warm and to see the face of God in another’s. I wanted to feel things again.
And I wasn’t going to back down. I wasn’t going to cede.
I’d deal with the flaring of old aches and assholes. No matter where I sat on the road to ruin, I’d search for the start. And no matter how big the darkness got, I’d push back.
I would say no.
I’d said it in December, when I’d called Emily instead of taking those pills. I’d said it when I decided to drop out instead of failing more classes. I’d said it every time I took my meds or brushed my teeth at night. Every time I chose the things I stood for, the things I loved, or wanted to love, I said no.
“Oh no, we won’t go. ‘Cuz we don’t know when to quit oh, oh!”
I know that I’d been listening to music the seven or so months I’d been at school— I’m never not listening to music—but I don’t remember what I’d been listening to. I don’t remember what radio stations I vacillated between or what artists I was playing over my aux chord. I don’t remember singing along.
But I remember Save Rock and Roll, and by the end of that road trip I knew the chorus to every song.
The album was alive, visceral in a way so few things had been for so long. I could hear it, taste it, smell it. It was sunshine and the blood of a bitten lip. It was gravel scraped knees and cold, crisp water. It was colored smoke and a gentle breeze. It was a rowdy and garish summertime tizzy.
And it grappled the winter out of me.
Save Rock and Roll was playing when I started to breathe again.
