To My Young Sad Friends
I recently listened to an interview with Peter Hook, the former bassist for New Order and Joy Division. Hook pointed out that while Ian Curtis wrote dark lyrics – like “I’m ashamed of the things I’ve been put through, I’m ashamed of the person I am” - Curtis lived energetically and enthusiastically, so that his suicide took his friends by surprise. The interviewer noted that Joy Division’s music and Curtis’s lyrics remain compelling to many people three and a half decades later, and suggested that music with this kind of staying power can’t be reduced to being simply a symptom of Curtis’s mental state.
As I listened I thought about how one of the appeals of music like Joy Division’s is that it resonates in that hollow and empty part many people feel aching in their chests. Music like this makes you feel less alone, makes you feel like someone gets it, someone’s been there like you have. That’s important, and that made me want to reach out to the sad young people in my life.
If you have that sick feeling inside sometimes, maybe it goes away at times. Maybe it comes back on cloudy days, or when something reminds you of a bad memory, or when you’re tired, or when life throws an unfair amount of obstacles in your way, or maybe it just comes randomly. Whatever the timing, younger people faced with that gnawing sensation inside need to know that it will eventually become easier to deal with. After a while you learn to live with, and someday it actually will go away. It may be hard to believe, but it really will.
No matter how bad things get, just remember that that dead zone sitting in your chest and draining away your energy is not your fault. Someone else put it there. Keep in mind that one day it will come to life. On that day the egg sac which for so long has sat pressing upon your organs and stealing away your body’s vital forces will split open with a wet splatter – it may feel a bit like bad heartburn or a burp that is stuck – and larvae will begin to wriggle forth slithering with a movement like wobbling jello as they crawl up your esophagus and begin to pour from your mouth, nose, and tear ducts, their stringy grey bodies warm and gelatinous like overcooked pasta. As the trickle turns into a torrent your retching will choke off your screams into a gurgle then silence. Your dismay at the sight of their pulsating, writhing, twitching forms and the smell in the air, a mix of the copper tang of blood – yours – and the sharp chemical yellow of bile and the burnt meat smell of the maggot-creatures’ bodies will soon give way as you lose consciousness from lack of oxygen. When you wake the colony of wormlings will, mercifully, have sealed your eyes shut with their gluey secretions, your lips and nostrils as well. You will feel their moist bodies brushing across your face and their small mouths biting into your skin but the narcotic in their saliva will lull you to a contemplative, meditative state as your metabolism slows – keeping you, their food source during this, their most vulnerable, formative stage, alive longer to ensure fresh meals.
All transitions between stages in life are difficult. Change is uncomfortable. When the time comes, remember Joy Division and similar music and the sense of connection – know that you are not alone, others too host the pupating larvae who soon will become the iridescent-husked locustoid hordes that will scour the earth in what the last suffering members of mere humanity will call a plague but which higher minds can only see as a glorious cleansing ascension. You won’t see their proboscises and mandibles tear at the soft eyes of the last hunted meat-carrying persons but you might hear a few screams over the buzzing of countless chitinous wings. Take satisfaction in the feeling that their discomfort, and the quieter but no less real discomfort you endured these long years, helped purchase a remade life for so very many others. You are important. You play a role.
Today, with its emptiness and despair, lasts so long and moves so slow, but remember this is ultimately just a brief moment, not forever. A better tomorrow awaits.