On Wildness

Essay 50

I chose a nice apartment, with balcony and flowers, there’s oat milk in my fridge and the trash is regularly emptied, the rugs are clean and my guitar mostly untouched; yes, I floss. And when I’m done with work and alone, I will walk up and down, I’ll hum, I’ll remember that other life. The cigarettes and the beers, and the vans carelessly parked, you wake up in the afternoon and then you head out; my signature move was my ability to carry a 60kg Sovtek amplifier head in high heels, what a loss. Once the band was safely onstage I could rest, I could lend myself to whatever was going on, conversations were saved until the end—they were the best, we kind of had an empire.

I never did drugs and never needed to, I was up for 20 hours each day, I could drive cross-country, pack out, do two shows, attend the party, all the while doing two master’s degrees in parallel. That exhaustion, my mascara smeared into white pillows, The Boho Dance alright in my neat rooftop pad, with my books, the wannabe bourgeois caught at the crossroads, I vomited on multiple rockstars’ shoes at the MTV launch gig, I felt like a tigress every day, until it made me sick. I look at old photos—the thinness, the sunglasses, a shell—and admit I looked like a junkie (which I was, I guess). That zest, that makes you rise up and every night go; that freedom, that stress, that hysterical, unnatural strength, nothing compares; count the heads, the tickets, the money, the shots lined up on the bar, find the keys for the back entrance, for the car, feeling in, feeling out of sorts all the time, in that well-known trance, how bad it was for me and, God, how much I miss it.

I drum on my desk as I type this, there’s no outgrowing it. Don’t turn around your gypsy heart, for sure, you choose life, you’re not a vampire, you’re a big girl now, you’re mature. But it’s there, that wildness, nothing’s happened to it, the earth hasn’t flattened to it, it comes to thrum every night, builds like a rhythm section into works of entrepreneurship and writing and affairs of passion, the wiring that connects life’s stage and the backstage where all the action unfolds; it’s untiring.