Verisimilitude

H. Z.

I’ve been taking walks for as long as I can remember. When I was much younger, in elementary school, it would be with my parents every night after dinner. It was a ritual in our daily routine: dinner, dessert, and a walk. My mother spent hours cooking food for us, sometimes waking up early to buy the freshest tofu at the market or starting in the afternoon to prepare shells of fried gluten that my father and I would help stuff with ground pork. While I set the table, my parents would prepare dessert—they would grip a thin, sharp knife and strip the skin off of apples, pears, peaches, and plums. They did this patiently and deliberately, holding the fruit in their left hands, rotating it counterclockwise as the skin shed a spiral staircase into the sink.

In Italian, a passeggiata is a stroll, usually taken after dinner, in which the whole town often participates. The word connotes leisure and the feeling of having all the time in the world. My parents would declare that it was time to 散步 (sàn bù), the Southern Chinese verb meaning “take a stroll.” On its own, the first character means “loose” or “free” and is the same character used to describe loose sheets of paper or to illustrate a state of disarray. Back then, what we had was something in between a passeggiata and 散步. We would trace the same long loop through the neighborhood, where we’d greet familiar faces: the lady with the white poodle, the mother who taught swim classes in the community pool, the man who lived by the mailboxes.

When I was old enough for my parents to trust me not to walk astray, I started walking alone. Having cohabited a room with my sister and kept a desk in the family room until I moved out for college, these walks satisfied my desire for solitude. I wasn’t yet in my teenage years, but I was already living in pretense. Everything that my parents and teachers expected of me—I thought that was what I wanted for myself, too. It was simpler to live like that, pretending that someone else’s goals were mine.

But on my walks, I could be anything I wanted. There were moments where I felt more song than human, or more like a feeling than like someone who felt. When I made my daily rounds through the neighborhood, I listened to music through my metallic blue iPod. I wished that I could be like those double-decker buses with the light-up destination signs on top, only in lieu of routes, I would announce the song I felt the most that day. I would walk around, and everyone would know that I was “Holocene” by Bon Iver, or “Asleep” by The Smiths, or “November Rain” by Guns N’ Roses.

I was lucky to have grown up during the explosion of the online music industry. LimeWire was released in 2000 and YouTube in 2005. Before then, all I had were the classical CDs my parents kept in the family car. I listened to a collection of Liszt piano pieces so many times that I had memorized the tracklist ordering and knew that the distance from my house to school was the length of “Un Sospiro” or the “Concert Paraphrase on Rigoletto,” depending on traffic. But with the Internet, I could suddenly consume and hoard entire discographies of anything I wanted.

I devoured scores of music in an effort to find something that felt like myself—I had listening phases ranging from classical to classic rock, indie folk to K-pop to dubstep. Yet one album that I couldn’t quite outgrow was The Black Parade, released by My Chemical Romance in 2006. Influenced by Pink Floyd’s The Wall and Queen’s A Night at the Opera, The Black Parade is a rock opera that follows the life, death, and afterlife of a cancer patient. At first I was drawn to the album because it embodied everything I thought I could never be. I could never be someone who’d dress up like a skeleton, get up on stage, and belt lines like, “Look at me, ‘cause I could not care at all.” But the smallest part of me thought maybe, maybe I could, and that fragment of possibility was enough to make me listen to the album over and over.

The album opens with the tracks “The End.” and “Dead!”, a declaration and an exclamation that forces the audience into an intimacy by shutting off the rest of the living world. Often labeled as “shy” and “quiet” since preschool, I was good at shutting myself off from others. I sat in the back of the classroom and hated when teachers called on me. I spent recess by myself in the library. Teachers would write notes home to my parents saying that I had perfect behavior, but they were concerned. Does she socialize? Does she have friends?

Some days, I felt like the moths circling the white lights around the tennis courts in the evening, acting on a pull inside me I could not explain. There is a theory for that phenomenon—the positive phototaxis—in moths, that the reason they fly to the light is because they mistake it for the moon. They use the moon as a magnetic north and keep their bodies oriented to it at the same angle. When instead our man-made lights outshine the moon, their bodies spiral in a path that inevitably leads to collision. I was never certain if I was moving toward the moon or to something brighter, something more self-destructive.

My family moved around a lot. I switched schools and school districts every couple of years. Making ties with anyone only led to hurt. I learned to let go, and later, to not hold on in the first place. It was a survival instinct. Each uprooting was as if my parents pressed pause on the best track of the album and replaced the CD with one I didn’t realize we owned. My walks devolved from an activity of leisure into one of necessity. I craved the forward motion that I forced from my body. I would walk five, seven miles until my feet were blistered and the blisters grew into layered callouses. I thought that if I knew every side road, every gutter, every tree in the sidewalk, I could lie and say that I had been here all along.

When I applied for college, the opening paragraph of my admissions essay was, “It was just another one of those nights where it felt like nothing. It’s been feeling like that a lot lately. Like nothing.” I sent my essay to a friend to read over the day before the deadline. He told me that this wasn’t what schools were looking for. It has too much escapism in it. It doesn’t set you apart. I panicked. I had refused to let my parents see any part of my application; the handful of people I trusted for advice meant something to me. I panicked, but I submitted that essay anyway without revising. It was honest in the only way I could be: on paper, to complete strangers.

The soaring outro of “The End.” is a desperate plea to escape the mundane. “Get me the hell out of here. / Too young to die and, my dear, / if you can just hear me, just / walk away.” When I mouthed along to these lines on the routes I had walked thousands of times, I fantasized that I could live a life I would never have—drop out of high school, take the next train out of the city, and abandon everything my parents built.

My mother didn’t trust my friends. Where did you learn to talk back like that? she would demand. Who have you been hanging out with? When I refused to tell her, she would fall to her primary backup strategy. She would compare me with my childhood best friend, M., who was smart and accomplished and polite to my mother. I didn’t have the energy to tell her that the fights M. had with her own mother were vicious to the point where her father had threatened to call the police several times. Instead, I’d stare blankly at her and wait for her to finish the same tirade she had been giving me for years. She would shout that it was all temporary, that sooner or later the people I considered to be my friends would leave me and that I was foolish to place my trust in them. That the only thing I’d have left was family, so I better treat them with respect while they were still alive. I refused to buy into the idea that respect was something that could be demanded like that. Any obedience I offered was a byproduct of fear.

By the time I was a teenager, I was too exhausted to be afraid. We had spent so long hurting each other, hurling insults back and forth, that it was almost an established schedule, something we needed to do after dinner and before bed. We wrung out the mother-daughter bond and slit it open, each time slashing at the wounds in the other that stung the most.

Things weren’t much better at school. Most of it felt pointless. Our school was short-staffed, which meant we spent hours listening to sports coaches try to teach history out of European History for Dummies or watching white board projections of Khan Academy videos. Some of our teachers conducted classes like they were a free, state-funded extended day care service where we watched movies and filled in coloring worksheets. The most educational movie period was in Spanish, when we watched Napoleon Dynamite (in English, but with Spanish subtitles). In Psychology, we spent days on end watching movies I don’t even remember the titles of. I spent these classes watching students pass around weed brownies and the student in front of me browse porn on his phone. Once, I got kicked out for talking too much, so I spent the period wandering the aisles of the grocery store a block down. In another course, one of my friends carved out a phone-sized rectangular chunk from the pages of our textbook so that it looked like he was reading when in actuality, he was watching The Office. Here, it was easy to give up.

One of the songs I played on repeat during my walks was “Disenchanted,” the penultimate track on the album. The protagonist finds his life meaningless and wonders, “Now, will it matter after I’m gone? Because you never learned a goddamn thing.” I found this unapologetic acknowledgment comforting. In ancient Tibetan Buddhism, there is a meditation practice called tonglen. Its meaning is dichotomous: giving and taking. The “taking” is the in-breath—you breathe in the suffering of others and internalize it. The “giving” is the out-breath—you think of some way to reduce their suffering and breathe out with the intention of healing. Listening to this song was a kind of tonglen for me. Absorbing the misery and melodrama it exuded allowed me to confront my own suffering. It was easier to see myself through the brokenness of others. When I sang along with the background vocals (“so wrong, so wrong”), I felt less alone.

My best friend was two years my senior—when we cut class together, we’d sometimes sit in her car and listen to music. She knew the entirety of The Black Parade by heart. We were sixteen and eighteen; we channeled our frustration and dissatisfaction with everything around us into looking like we didn’t care. We showed up late to class, if at all, and we skipped detention. We forged notes to excuse ourselves from attending school for weeks at a time. We were a step away from the stereotype outlined in “Teenagers”—“they could care less as long as someone’ll bleed.” We felt like we didn’t, and couldn’t, belong. Neither of us found solace in family, but we found it with each other, in the subtext of the music we shared. Our songs were about cities far away, and we dreamed that there, life could be better. Our own city was an illusion of oxidized copper presented as jewels. Something that was once shiny, but after generations of decay, corroded from being a destination to a place people ended up.

Some of our teachers had taught our classmates’ parents. Our classrooms hadn’t been renovated since the ’60s. On rainy days, we took out the plastic buckets stored in the corners of the room to catch droplets that would dribble through the ceiling. The night after my friend graduated, she drove to our school and smashed empty beer bottles against the walls of a classroom we both hated. Her final fuck you before moving time zones away.

The word “black” traces its roots to the Greek phlegein, meaning “to burn or scorch.” In Chinese, the character for black, 黑 (hēi), tells a similar story. The character is a combination of the characters for dirt (土), bowl, and fire (火). The word originally meant “ink”, and the characters refer to the leftover soot from a fire collected in a bowl used to make it. The stories the ink creates are thus a kind of reincarnation—creation from destruction.

When describing the inspiration behind The Black Parade, the lead singer, Gerard Way, said, “I like to believe that death comes for you however you want subconsciously. Maybe it’s a manifestation of a strong memory. So for this character, the patient, who’s dying tragically young in his 30s in the hospital, his strongest memory is of his father taking him to see this parade in the big city when he was a little boy.” At the cusp of the patient’s departure, his imagination personifies death into a grandiose black parade. In the title piece “Welcome to the Black Parade,” his memory is what outlives his ashes. The song climaxes in earnest vocals backed by up-tempo drumming in a style that makes the listener want to scream along each time Way belts, “We’ll carry on.” The piece consolidates the loneliness and depression of other songs on the album into a sliver of optimism.

The gang vocal outro declares, “Do or die, you’ll never make me! (We’ll carry on!) / Because the world will never take my heart! (We’ll carry on!).” Addressing this invisible “you,” which for me, was the projection of myself into society, was freeing. When I sang, “You’ll never make me,” it was to the pieces of myself that were deluded into living someone else’s life and expectations. To all the parts that prevented me from figuring out which version of myself I wanted to keep. When I played this song, it felt like each lyric was chipping away at the layers of lacquer I had suffocated my body with. I thought that if I could not see myself, I would be happy. This song made me feel like I could just be.

Before I left for college, I gathered all the personal writings I had written and received. I didn’t save electronic versions of my poetry or prose, so what I had was all in hard copies or handwritten. The few I wanted to keep, I secured in a black folder that I carried from dorm to dorm through my four years of college. I bundled the rest in a pile on my garage floor, where I crouched over them with a lighter. I burned the parts of myself I didn’t want anyone to find. I wish that I could have been braver and believed the words when I sang,“I won’t explain or say I’m sorry / I’m unashamed, I’m gonna show my scars.” I didn’t want to explain, and I wanted to pretend that the scars never existed. I wanted to forget.

My mother helped me move into university that August. The last day of move-in, we were sitting in the rental car and had already finished saying our goodbyes. I promised to call every day, and was about to open the car door to a new life when she stopped me. Wait, she said. Tears were streaming down her cheeks. Wait. I am so sorry, she said, over and over. For what? I asked. She wasn’t one to apologize. I’m sorry I was a bad mother to you. I’m sorry I could never be there for you when you needed it.

It’s okay, I replied. It’s okay. People were laughing and cheering outside, making me impatient. I swallowed hard to stop myself from crying. I’m sorry I couldn’t help you, she repeated. It’s okay, I said, and left.

There are still nights that feel like nothing. I still daydream about cities that don’t exist and the person that I might be. But I am getting better at filling up the vacancy, at soldering back into place the shards of myself that I had tried so hard to destroy. When I listen to My Chemical Romance, it is as the memory of the girl I once was. In my empty apartment, I am transported back to those years I spent walking up and down the rows of muted houses, coping with the pain of becoming. When I sing the words, “I am not afraid to keep on living / I am not afraid to walk this world alone,” I remember how it felt to be afraid. Before I shut the lights off and go to bed, I call my mother. I tell her, Yes, I have already eaten dinner, and yes, I am already home from work. She asks if I am doing okay.

When I die, if death comes to me as a memory, it will be me as a young girl, walking up the hills near my house, alone. I will stop at the grassy outlook near the peak like I always do and look out onto the city. The blinking cars will hustle down Main Street, the buildings downtown will fade into the simmering horizon, and I will stand there watching until the clouds fold their velvet wings over the sinking sun.