Roll With It

I didn’t get Oasis tickets. 

I couldn’t really afford Oasis tickets, but I wanted to believe I could afford them, and what is being alive if not believing you can afford all the things that might ruin you? I got my little special presale code in my inbox signed in, lined up, queued, and discovered that seats were hundreds of dollars and then sat in despair looking at the screen imaging being in a crowd of 50,000 people and for a second it was beautiful and for another, more sober second it was a vision of death. 

I’m not interested in hearing whether people like Oasis or not, because I am 42 and I have done this before. Some of us lived the “Oasis are bad actually” years as they happened and to do it again is to chase something that was never real. No one cares if you don’t like them, you prefer Blur or Pulp or Silverchair or calling me slurs or whatever. None of this matters, none of this is real. 

I can’t smoke anymore. 

I have smoked off and on since I was a teenager, since we could smoke inside, in restaurants divided by lattice and velvet ropes, in cafes and in bars that left all our clothes tainted by the memories of all the night befores. The day after they banned smoking inside I smelled my winter jacket for the first time and realized it had to go. A brown suede jacket with fur lining and trim that felt fun when I wore it, a little too masculine maybe, like cosplaying the Marlboro Man, with the fur as a hint of something secret. All the things I wanted hiding in the shell of the hand I was forced to play.

I can’t smoke anymore for health reasons, I’ve been having chest issues since the second time I got COVID and now I have some deeper problems with my stomach and my chest and my lungs and I have to be careful about what I eat and the wrong thing often makes me very sick and smoking just seems like too big of a risk. This is very adult of me to say. Too big of a risk. I can’t smoke, so I don’t, but I think about it every day, like I think about everything else I used to be able to do. The lingering ghost of the past is strong in sobriety, all the memories of days before this one that are no longer real. That I can paint with such vivid detail, except the days and nights that are all together gone. Lots of those. Just the smell remains, stuck to the fur lining of a jacket. 

I think about smoking when I think about Oasis too. Because when (What’s the Story) Morning Glory came out in 1995 it felt like it changed everything, made it all feel new. I remember sitting in class, near the window and close to the back of the room, and seeing circles of popular girls sitting outside trading stolen cigarettes between each others fingers singing their best recollection of the lyrics to “Wonderwall” together and it felt like seeing magic, real honest magic, alive in the world. I think about wanting to be someone else, and dreaming of possibility. 

Oasis existed around this idea of possibility, before I discovered them music I gravitated to was often brash and brooding and reflective of all my dark spots and hard angles but that didn’t feel sustainable. I wanted, sometimes, to believe and to feel and to dream and imagine. To trade cigarettes with friends and remember most of the words but not all of them and wanted that not to matter either. I just wanted to feel something that flirted with life. 

It’s national coming out day today, according to social media posts and targeted ads, and I think about cigarettes with that too. Standing on the patio of my apartment above a haunted electrical supply store in the Yukon smoking cigarettes and a little weed, drinking whisky out of a glass or a flask or sometimes both and blowing smoke into the cold, crisp, dead air of a Yukon winter. The northern lights were out last night in Ontario and Saskatchewan and when people post photos of them I think about home. I think about the bitter darkness of the night in the dead of the winter in the north because there the night is never ending and the dark spots and hard angles are easier to find and sometimes smoking helped, and sometimes drinking did too but that was not sustainable. I think about the first nights after I came out as trans for the last and final time and the moments of peace I had with a cigarette on the patio and the snow at my feet, the cold in my bones and the fur of a new jacket and the hint of possibility and I think about all the someone else’s I could be.

After I came out I was jumped on the street close to that apartment. I could see the spot where it happened from my patio. I got threats and sneers and words of love and support and I spiraled a lot. I had recursive emotional breakdowns and collapses. I became erratic, I drank more, I sold all my shit. I moved to Toronto with a suitcase with fucked up wheels and a pack of cigarettes and I smoked on the patio with my friend Paul who, along with his partner Amy, graciously gave me sanctuary. We drank a little together, but it was different there. I was letting go, and I was learning to dream of being someone else. 

People always say “I’ll still be the same old me” when they come out to reassure people, and I did too, but that was always a bit of a lie. Part of this is becoming someone new, some new me that can become old, and that is more the point. The point is not to stay the same, the point is to change and to shift and to bite, like the wind and the cold in the winter and the northern lights in a perfect black sky. The point is to change, and the point is to let go, and the point is to not be afraid of all the dark spots and hard angles. The point is to dream of being someone new. I didn't get Oasis tickets, and I can’t even smoke cigarettes anymore anyway, and maybe all of this is trying to afford the perfect dream of an imperfect memory of the past. All of the hard memories and the smell of the nights before this one that has stuck to our fur are worth it, if only for the possibility hiding in being someone new.

I hope you got Oasis tickets if you wanted them. I hope you smoke a cigarette if you want one today too. I hope we can all dream of becoming someone new and hold that feeling forever as we shiver in the cold and feel the fur on our skin. I hope we all become old versions of our new selves, and dream of affording tickets to the memories of all the things that might ruin us.