245. Song No. 3,666: “Fuck You Aurora,” Alkaline Trio
Maybe I’ll Catch Fire, 2000

This song—one that I would’ve thought was about a car crash if not for hearing it through the filter of losses dictated by brand-new and wholly unwelcome distances—is absolutely saturated with high school and, consequently, that era’s goodbyes that rubbed so raw and cut so deeply that I’m apparently forever doomed to carry around some traces of those formative wounds, the person I’d become just growing around that void until it’s a part of me, a knothole I can either leave wide open and vulnerably gaping or fill with whatever traces of life give it purpose.

Losing people I love to places far away is… uh, a theme not unfamiliar to this blog, whether directly addressed or not. I’ve had bitter feuds with cities that far outlasted the relationships they killed (or, more optimistically, the time someone I love actually lived there) so often that it’s pretty familiar terrain at this point, and I’m not totally sure I could verbalize what it even feels like to not be shouldering the extra weight of some metropolis-sized grudges.

I’ve done it with Boston, I did it with Austin, I’ve deeply resented cities from the Northeast to the PNW; I’ve broadened my resentment to include international locales that had the audacity to make me do math to figure out where someone I care about was in the pattern of their day, though that was a blessedly temporary, if not powerful, grievance.

My husband and I recently started talking about the necessity of relocating for his job, a thing that went from a nebulous possibility too formless to even consider materializing to us now sending “Ooooh, look at THIS house!” texts to each other from our respective sides of the couch while also researching towns we’ve never heard of in a place we’ve never considered as a potential home ’til about a month of For-Serious Conversations ago. (To our credit, though, we did assume we’d be up and leaving for the mountains, even if we assumed it’d be more like Vermont or the Adirondacks.)

I’ve only discussed this surreal development with the two friends I named my maids of honor eons ago (over a lunch break meet-up with the one I’ve known the longest; while texting with the one who’s why I’m both continuing a lifelong pattern of fostering deeply personal enmity toward far-flung locales and genuinely excited that hauling westward ass means a temptingly truncated two-hour plane ride between us, never mind that a two-hour distance by flight still sucks when it used to be a 10-minute drive if traffic was bad), both of whom told me exactly what I needed to hear from them, all specific to each relationship.

And while hubs and I are both way more into pulling up anchor than we thought we’d be, it’s definitely a weird reality to be facing down together: It’s weird to finally be in this position after a lifetime of entirely too many goodbyes I had no control over and where I was the one worth leaving, and it’s weird to be so ready for a massively disruptive life change that my oldest friend is really the only person I feel any deep and immediate sadness about putting 2,100 miles and two time zones between us.

“Fuck You Aurora” sounded so cathartically angry to me for the first couple of years I knew it, when my sense of loss was contained to the me-centric model of how much it hurts to be left behind, how could someone I love so much just voluntarily abandon me, what about me is so easy to drop for parts unknown. The combination of a broken heart, wounded ego and dynamic-shattering distance birthed so much hurt and anger that I didn’t know how to verbalize, and having this song to shriekingly caterwaul along to was an invaluable ally in the repeating patterns of watching another beloved soul recede into the gaping maw of a distance that couldn’t wait to swallow us whole, spit us out and, in doing so, tear us apart.

It sounds more nuanced and mournful than that now, maybe because I’m finally hearing it the way it’s meant to be heard. Or, since art is all about the experiences you bring to it, maybe I’ve reluctantly accepted that sometimes what other people need has nothing to do with you no matter how much they love you, that even the change that’s best for you comes with consequences like every other choice always does, and that letting people go is something you have to do without letting selfish rancor make a tough reality harder by bitterly nurturing an emotional distance that’s far more ruinous and impregnable than any physical divide could ever be.