i'm having wicked dreams

on the "pink pony club," broken halos, and boys from Tennesse

when i heard the opening of “Pink Pony Club” in concert, i almost threw up. 

it was the encore to the most amazing 1.5 hrs of my life. glitter, party, gay people — should’ve been the recipe for a perfect conclusion to a sparkling night.

but when chappell roan sang “i’m having wicked dreams / i’m leaving tennessee / oh santa monica / i swear it’s calling me,” it immediately flung me back to a broken boy in a dorm lounge in a Tennesse volunteers hat, head bowed in his hands, forming a fractured halo.

the boy who i saved that night, but who i ultimately left behind.

in this crowd of pink pony strangers, i jumped up and down and cried. i sang with a middle-aged butch from New Jersey and twirled with the Ethel-Cain lookalike twins from Canada. as my own bedazzled small-town friends jammed behind me, the sky lit up with glitter and spotlights and guitar solos.

but while i danced and screamed and reveled in the night’s close, i thought of the broken boy. and while he swore by “two types, country and western,” i believe that this glitter gel pen pop crowd of every queer person in a 100 mile radius could change — and even save — his life.

so while i danced to the closing song of the concert, my two wolves of queer joy and dark, festering guilt battled. 

because while i've told myself his threats to his life were all a hoax to trap me that night, a complex mindgame to which i had tracked the strings, something deep in my cracked heart could feel that his pain was honest.

a last-ditch cry for help. he knew we were connected by a similar thread — one that he had tried, to much avail, to cut his entire life. but as reality sunk in and his brief period of denial to what he was disintegrated once more, in a moment of panic he tugged on that undeniable line to cry out to me.

but i was only one person in that lounge that night. and while i saved his life then — if he really did need saving — to undo a lifetime of rejection and fear requires much more than the only queer person he had decided to befriend in the big gay state of New York. 

it requires a community. a community like the crowd i was standing in … without him.

don’t think, i’ve left you all behind

still love you and tennessee

you’re always on my mind

he refused to leave. he refused to live. i had lectured and pled and rationalized, but he would always choose the gun to his head rather than the loss to his heart. 

“it’s a culture difference,” he reprimanded through clenched teeth. “you wouldn’t get it. i am nothing without my family. nothing without my community. at the very least, nothing without my friends.”

and when all those were at risk of fading into nothing, he would’ve chosen to fade into nothing as well that night.

and i suppose i wouldn’t understand. i’m from the northeast after all – the land of pride parades and stonewall and no conversion therapy. even my world of church twice a week and “out of sight out of mind” doesn’t change that.

but i also know that, if it came down to it, i would chose a life with just me and a blank slate to no life at all.

i don’t regret closing the door. there’s only so many times you can loosen someone from their noose, all while tying your own. i didn’t speak for a week after the night in the lounge, and the second i drove away from campus at the end of the semester, i broke down. the weight of his words, his threats, and his lifetime of pain with a complete negligence for my own had broken my bones.

and while i have spent the past month mending myself with a cast of solitude and crutches of hours long phone calls reliving every detail of our interactions, i still feel that thread connecting us. sometimes i imagine you tugging on it, pulling me closer. everytime i listen to “Pink Pony Club,” or hear some word that reminds me of you, i feel your pain as if it’s my own. 

but that pain i feel isn’t my responsibility anymore, and it never was. i have replaced your noose for a necklace of kaleidoscopic beads, and i wish nothing but for you to do the same.

so to luke, here’s a song for you. i hope one day, you make a journey to your santa monica and become a pink pony girl in your own regard. to everyone who feels stifled to death but can’t leave Tennessee, i feel for you. and i hope one day, you do.

(bonus content: video taken by my friend of the exact part in “pink pony club” at our concert where i felt most pained but also most connected)