Finding the Beauty in a Spectacular Nothingness

Riptide by Vance Joy had been my favorite song for almost two years straight. I’ve moved onto other music now, but I will always be in love with how none of the lyrics make any sense. It's like someone reached into a soul, scooped out a squirming handful of living images and scenes, and plopped them carefree onto an intimately simple three chord progression. I poured over that song for months, scouring every corner of the internet, searching desperately for a meaning inside that beautifully wild tangle of words and sounds, frantic and in awe of how a human brain could create something so simple, and yet so confusing - something that made absolutely no sense, but communicated with my confused youthful heart more intimately than any spoken word from mortal lips before. Living that song was a grand quest, you see, one that I know I was predestined to live, but one that has never had a clear destination. But, there was a magnificence in its flustered haze, and that magnificence is what I’d later fall in love with. Like searching for the moon in a night swollen with fog, trying desperately to find the beauty in the swell and swoon of a spectacular nothingness. I remember not so much the specifics of the scenes I lived, like what I was wearing, or what the date was. I just remember that feeling.

I was never good at "feeling" things, I thought all my feelings were weakness. I felt that if I, a boy, was a garden, then emotions must all be weeds. Growing up, we raised gardens with veggies, and flowers, and herbs, and we killed the weeds with a passion. My emotions, like weeds, just "got in the way", and I was disgusted at their disorder. How could something so chaotic have a place in my body? How could they mean anything valuable? If not understood, then their value is nothingness. The need to be liked by everyone at school? Weak. The fear I felt while I watched my Parents fight? Weak. The buzz of nervous butterflies that swarmed through my guts whenever I passed a pretty girl in the hall? Very, very weak. I needed to feel big and in charge of myself, but those weeds made me always feel helpless. They were too wild, too untamed, filled with bitter sadness and prickly shame, and worst of all, they stole from the energy of the life I worked so hard to control. I had no time to keep them in my thoughts.

And so, as a boy, I looked down at my life, and the weeds I saw grow before me. I said to myself, "now's no time to be weak", and killed them as fast as I could. See, when I pulled weeds, I never pulled them by the roots. I was young, and impatient, and just wanted to be done, so I'd just carelessly tear their wild heads off leaving their roots to sprout more wild heads later. And when I felt an emotion that made me uneasy, I'd pluck em so carelessly same. They'd sprout, and then seed, till my insides were wild, and I'd frantically fight for control. I’d pluck, and I’d tear till my insides were raw, but their roots were always too deep to see. That boy that I was, he'd watch in frustrated horror as they grew back in patches. I'd pull as they bloomed, but my emotions grew faster than me so I tore, till my insides were raw. But for every feeling I stamped out, ten more would grow in its place, and it forced me to dig them out more. I grew frantic, feral with self destructive obsession. I needed to be in control. I screamed at the budding weeds, helpless as my feelings grew wilder. And if my soul was a garden, and my feelings were weeds, then I'd burn them all out till I was clean. When the tickle popped up, of some sadness, or shame, I'd explode at it, and lash out in anger. My hate was my thoughts, my words, and with no pause, I'd flare up in self hating all consuming rage till my overgrown emotions withered and died in the inferno and all I felt was anger. A sack of flesh, swelling with fire; that's what I was, when I first heard the song. I remember it like it was yesterday.

I was an angry kid, fresh into 11th grade, sitting angrily behind a stack of geometry, head full of angry music that tickled my insides with fire. The rumbling ironclad instruments swirled inside my guts, melting into the breaks in the graveled voices, reciting an animal's song to a rhythmic thunder, like war drums. They spoke with a rumble that festers in the sternum, roaring out under the pressure, erupting out of the nozzles of my earphones catching everything inside me on fire. I ate it all up until my guts were magma, and the rest of my feelings all burnt in the violence.

"Lady, running down to the riptide…."

Those words slipped through the cracks of headphones, and sprinkled my screaming brain with a gentle whisper. I think it was in that brief two second pause that waits between changing songs that I first heard it. The sound of that lonely ghost was whisper-quiet and trapped outside of my earphones, but I could hear him echoing for a heartbeat or two between my own angry music. My brain sputtered and choked as I heard it.

"I love you, when you're singing that song and…"

It was so soft, and so longing, but most of all it was so very beautifully sad. I’d never heard anything like that out loud before. It cut through my brain and into my soul like droplets of silver moonlight slicing through a foggy night, reaching for my face in the cold; it was pure, it was soft, and it pressed starkly and cold against the grotesque firestorm of the music I had just consumed. For a moment, I swear, it even cooled my flames.

I could hear it echoing for a heartbeat or two before the next raging song in my headphones started. I let my music take over again for a bit, but the hateful rumble rolled right off my brain. My anger would spark, but then sputter and die as my thoughts stumbled back to that foreign sound I’d just heard. It was playing from my older sister’s computer, and I wanted nothing to do with it. She listened to girl music. But something about that lonely ghost’s song cut deeper than the sharp words and screams of our parents through our thin midnight walls. The song slipped through the cracks of my head, echoing in my skull and fading to a hollow cold that made my insides freeze and tingle and burn. I paused my own music and listened to what the ghost had to say.

“There’s this movie that I think you'll like. This guy decides to quit his job and head to New York City, oh all my friends are turning green…”

I really had no idea what that meant, and I hated it. Everything needs meaning, if not, then why is it here? You can’t write music from nothing, that’d be stupid, and lazy. I was frustrated at the song’s lack of congruency, and at its haphazard nonsense, but most of all, I was frustrated that I couldn’t scrape the song from my brain. There was a ghost behind the lyrics. He was lonely and quiet, and needed to be heard. Once I let him in my ears, he clung to my soul, and he begged me to find a meaning in that nothingness.

There’s a lot of silly little feelings that the song evokes from me, miles and miles of thoughts and scenes and memories the lyrics coax right out from my chest. To this day the second I hear the first chord strum, my nostalgia is jump started, jolted back into existence by a feeling I’ll never shed, ‘cause in a really convoluted and roundabout way, that lonely ghost was the very first thing I heard on the very first day of my life. His song didn’t make any sense, but the ghost kept singing, half a step above the open, those three chords softly watering my weeds till I drifted far enough from myself and gave into the current tugging at my bones. I finally asked my sister for the song’s name.

“It’s called, ‘Riptide’.” She told me. “It’s by Vance Joy.” It was the first soft song I listened to in my life.

About a month after that, I’d already forgotten about the song. I was in a spare room of a Mormon church building, sitting in the very back row of a small language class that my parents had forced me to attend. I was more full of fire than ever. I could feel my heart closing, my soul saying “No more.”, and it terrified me to feel my heart turning off. See, at this time in my life, I felt very alone; my best and only friend had just moved to Georgia. And aside from that, and the sproutings of loss, my sister was scheduled to leave and travel to Cambodia for two years on a mission for the Church, and even more, my father had recently left. He still loved us, his kids, but hated my mother, and even though we saw him from time to time, it still hurt. I could feel a tangle of weeds bursting from my insides every day, so I tamed them the only way I knew. I burned all those thoughts, and turned them to hate till I was soaking with magma and tormented confusion. On the first day of class, I kept to myself, brooding behind a near-empty notebook, my mind chattering in an inattentive haze of internet memes and how much I hated Cambodia.

“HEEEEEEyyyyy YYAAAAyyy YAAAAyyyAA. What’s going on?”

A voice cut through the monotony of class with a meme I thought was hilarious. It was a He Man cover of “What's up” by Four Non Blondes someone on the internet showed me, and it’s disruptiveness ripped me from my thoughts and spun my head towards the sound. That meme was the last thing I expected from the class, and it came from a girl in the front of the room. For a moment, her joke snuffed out my flames. I sat for a moment, watching her laugh, then retracted back into my corner. I tried to be angry, but the fires wouldn’t catch because her joke was distracting and kinda funny.

After a bit, I had managed a spark, and I was beginning to rebuild my fire. I was still full of fears, and sadness, and weeds, and they still needed to be burned out from me. I was sitting alone, staring out a window, when I heard her say, “LeT mE INtroDuce yOu to My nEw OCs.” It was an artist joke, something that I knew because at the time I was an artist myself. See, online, I was in communities where artists like me would make original characters, or “OCs”, but before then, I’d never met another artist like me in person. My head snapped around when my ears ate that sound, and *Puff*, my flames were blown out.

She had bouncy hair that moved when she talked. She had thick glasses that were all scratched and smudgy. She spoke so carefree, and bubbly, and irreverent. She was disorderly, and disruptive and alive. In all my days of living, I had never found anyone with an aura quite as wild hers. I found that disorder kind of nice, in a way, because I never knew what she would do. When I sat in that class my weeds were wild, and my fires would *Puff!*, be blown right out. Before I knew it, my weeks were spent still burning alive, clinging onto the seeds in my soul till Fridays at 7PM, when I could walk through those double doors of the old Mormon church building and let my weeds thrive and be alive, even if it was just for an hour - when I could hear her lips speak beautiful nonsense, even if I knew I would be too anxious to speak anything back.

The vocals in Riptide are so waifishly small, and delicately wild but precise. That girl's hands were the same, in a way, if you saw them. They were pretty, and soft, like daisies. I remember I watched them draw buttcheeks on the whiteboard one time when she was called to write an answer. I laughed so hard, in the back of that class, and I realized it’d been months since I laughed from my gut, laughed for real. A different day after class had ended, I watched her hands play the piano. She played for a moment, only a minute or two, but it was so pretty, and I knew she loved music. Some people just have music inside them, you see melodies bud from their skin. That girl from my class had a voice like knots of clovers, it was soft, and pretty and bright, and as much as I saw music in her, I saw her inside my favorite song. I don't remember why my brain connected her with Riptide, but it did, and when I heard it I felt truly untamed. Those sad little melodies by Vance Joy reminded me of that girl, and so the only soft song I knew became my favorite song in the world.

I spent hours during the nights, listening to those same three chords, till just listening wasn’t enough. I needed more, so I found a guitar in my garage and started learning. I half learned to play so I could impress that girl I was too terrified to talk to, and half played because it reminded me of her. I hated the fire that ate me alive, and when I thought of her, the fires puffed out. And so, every night, I played till the moon would shine on my bed and drip down my raw, shaking fingers. There was so much beauty in the lyrics. There was so much beauty in the chords. So much beauty in all of its wildness. I dissected that song every night. I pulled it apart with strings and bleeding fingertips, and played it over and over again, every night, every day frantically trying to figure out “how?”

I must’ve played the song at least ten thousand times till eventually it wasn’t enough. I started writing my own music, longing with every root and fiber in my body to create something as beautiful as Riptide. I spent many more hours during pitch black nights, cradling my guitar and my words, but no matter how hard I tried to construct beautiful music, it always felt so strangled and lifeless. I started to research music theory, and tips for writing music. I memorized the structures of songs. I learned and consumed until I’d get exhausted again, and I’d go back and just play Riptide. There was something in that song that I needed. I needed my music to “stick”, the way Riptide stuck to my brain. Or like how dandelions stick to gravel and never come out, or how that girl was stuck to my favorite song. I decided it was my quest, to create something wild and alive, something beautiful. I would become good at music. I would impress that girl in my class. I was gonna be wild, and full of life, and passion, and I was ready to grow on this journey. Then one day, my parents pulled me out of that Cambodian class.

After about a year, I was back to my old self. I hadn’t seen the girl since the class, and hadn’t touched a guitar in months. I was an angry kid, fresh into 11th grade, staring into the dirty glass of the giant fish tank that stands in the middle of the dentist's office waiting room. My head was full of raging flaming thoughts that tickled my insides with fire. I watched the fishes dance and play tag with one another, they lived so carefree in that tank. My mind was a hurricane of swirling anxieties and fears, and self hatred for not being in control of my emotions, cause if those unsightly emotions would just stop growing where they didn’t belong, I wouldn’t have to be tormented by all this fire. I’m sitting in my chair, in my self immolation, till something at the front of the dentists office catches my eye.

The welcome bell of the front door jingles, and a goofy looking dad walks in from the door. He’s lanky and balding. He has the goofiest looking smile, and I swear, he looks exactly like the dad of that girl from Cambodian class.

My heart skips a beat, and the flames in me sputter, and cough, and I’m filled with a rush of nostalgia. I look at the man, look away, then look at him again. He looks exactly like her dad, but that would be very unlikely, so I convince myself it’s somebody else. I retract my eyes to the floor, and I spark up my usual fire cause for a second, I almost felt kind of sad. I hold my flame to the stems of my sadness and longing and thoughts of that girl I was too scared to talk to, then the front door chimes, and opens again.

She swings open the front door of the dentist office, and it crashes to a close behind her. She’s wearing light blue jeans, and a light blue sweater. It’s a size or two too large. When she walks, the sleeves sag down to her palms, and her fingers poke out as pretty and delicate as lawn daisies.

The fire in me is puffed out, away, wisps of smoke leave my mouth as I freeze. She stands by her dad, then walks in my direction, and sits to my left, on the other side of the fish tank.

Remember the very first time you heard her voice? The way it bubbled, and bounced in the air like dandelion seeds?

My brain sputters, and chokes, gurgles in disbelief. My mind is empty for just a moment. Then I quickly explode, silently in my chair, as my mind surges with a tsunami of self hate, and emotion. I’m blooming with longing to speak to her, but I sit frozen and nailed to my chair.

Remember when she brought a blanket to class, and fell asleep right there, on the floor? I wish that we could live that freely.

Why can’t I stop these disgusting little weeds as they grow? They fill up my lungs and strangle my voice. I can’t even look in her direction, much less speak.

Remember when you took the class for months, but never once said a single word to her? It’s a shame you're the weakest boy who’s ever breathed, it’s no wonder you can’t handle the weeds.

My insides are sliced till they’re bloody and tattered by the knowledge that I’m still too terrified to talk to her. The feeling strangles my guts and slices through my soul like thick thorny blackberry vines creeping into my garden. I panic and tear every emotion I see as it sprouts, then I feel myself erupt full of desperate fire. All those roots in my guts, all the fears, sadness, anxiety, guilt and wild untamed emotion bursts from my insides all at once in a chaotic tangle of flaming panicked desperation, and I helplessly watch as they grow. I need to escape, get out of this place. I need the weeds to just be quiet. I need to be back in control, because I know with all my heart the fire in me isn’t enough to kill all the weeds, and that if I don’t take my brain away from right here in the next five seconds, I’ll swell, explode, and then die right here in this dentists office waiting room like the weak kid I was terrified of being.

Five.

I need to escape, I need a distraction. I need something in my head besides myself.

Four.

I pull out my phone, put my earbuds in, and race to my music player app. I have over 700 angry raging songs on my phone, and right now I need to eat fire.

Three.

I’ve opened up all my music. My Thumb moves down towards “Shuffle Play”.

Two.

I brace for the sound, something violent I hope, I need to burn all the weeds.

One….

Play.

I remember the exact moment the first downstrum of that ukulele rang through my ears. I remember it like it was yesterday. It was February 6th, 2018, the very first day of my life. I was fresh into 12th grade, sitting calmly in my chair, staring at the giant fish tank that stood between me and a girl I wanted with my whole heart to know. I didn’t pluck any feelings, or burn myself clean, I just sat there, watching them grow. I listened to my favorite song, and watched the fish float around their tank, so carefree in the hum of the water. I heard the rush of the winter wind slipping past the cars and heard crows speaking over the traffic. I stayed silent for a while, just experiencing the world, then I smiled, then giggled, then laughed.

For the first time in almost a year, I laughed freely, from my chest, tickled by ferns and buttercups. I must’ve looked insane laughing alone in my chair. I was laughing because of how none of it made any sense. How I’d spent so many nights hoping to see her again, hoping to talk to her, and tell her how i felt, and tell her I wrote songs about her, but when I finally had her next to me, I still couldn’t locate even a single word in my mouth. I was laughing cause even though I spent years piling rage, anger and hate, it only took one moment for it to fizzle out and die - I could feel in the deepest corners of my young soul that the flames were gone for good. But most of all, I was laughing at the scene I was living.

There’s a pretty girl behind a large ocean filled with bubbles and fake grass, humming soothing little ambiances on my left-hand side, and I'm laughing to myself quietly in my corner because out of over 700 songs, the first one that plays is this one song I’ve really liked for a while called Riptide by Vance Joy, and it's opening lines are, “I was scared of dentists and the dark, I was scared of pretty girls and starting conversations...” And now, I’m sitting here laughing to myself at the irony while she’s sitting in a pretty light blue sweater and jeans right there behind a big fish tank that kinda feels like an ocean and even though to anyone except me this moment means absolutely nothing, I can’t help but feel like this nothingness is the most spectacular beautiful, wild untamed thing I’ve ever lived in my life.

I never did talk to her that day, I’m actually glad I didn’t. I don’t think I was supposed to. That day, after the dentist, my family went to Wendy’s. It was the first time in a while my parents were in the same room without fighting. I ate my frosty and stared outside of a window, in breathless awe as the universe moved outside before me. The way the leaves on the street swirled and danced in the air as they were swept up in a gust of passing traffic. No one planned their performance, but they still moved with the most beautiful purpose.

It’s been two years since that day in the dentist’s office, which makes me about two years old. Sometimes, I look back to that start of my life, and sit in awe of how grand it all was. How intimate it is to watch fishes dance, or to sit by yourself and just laugh. That’s what the song’s about I think, what the lonely ghost behind the music was saying. It’s not about love, or longing, It's not even that girl from that class I took in what feels like a lifetime ago. He sits behind that messy tangle of lyrics and sounds and waits for people who listen close enough to hear him. Cause life will move, and grow, it’ll swell and swoon and bloom in haphazard abandon. It’ll reach out its faces and roots, and nothing is planned, and nothing makes any sense, and we’ll rage, and hate ourselves and fall apart as we try and force a meaning into the chaos until we eventually realize that there’s nothing but “nothingness”, and that it’s the most beautiful thing to exist in. as I hear the chords play, and my memories start, I’ll never again not be listening close for nothing in particular, searching for the beauty in a wild, untamed, spectacular nothingness.