All We Are Is Bullets...
"Think of me long enough to make a memory"
You'd think there was nothing in the world more commanding than watching Mindless Self Indulgence play. Seriously, the energy with which those four people threw themselves into their music and performances was completely unreal. It was incendiary and breathtaking.
And yet...
My mind was elsewhere.
Fancy that.
I was sitting on a disused storage crate side stage in the Metro Radio Arena in Newcastle, ostensibly taking in MSI's set but really far, far away. As usual. I had grown up trapped in a maze of reality intertwined with beautiful daydreams, to which I escaped whenever the real world became too much.
A sanctity here
I call home, I run to
When winter descends
Right now, I was blithely oblivious to the concerted efforts of a group of girls in Evanescence t-shirts, stood in the front row, who were trying desperately to catch my attention. I wasn't deliberately ignoring them-I was merely surfing another galaxy in my brain.
Gosh, that was an awful metaphor. Well, I'm trying to sum up the enormity of feeling I was reliving. That's right, not current feeling, memories of it. I was thinking back to the day Gerard and I broke up. All those years ago... It was a Friday. That is, it started on a Friday. That break up was a three day weekend of trauma, misery, and hell, that I had spent an aggregate of years reliving ever since. I'd toyed with the memories, scolded myself for creating them, played with the idea of what would have happened if they never took place. Oh, but I knew what would have happened if they had never taken place. Either Gerard or I would be dead. There was no question about that; our relationship had always been very intense. As in thunderstorm intense. When we fought, the very bowels of the earth shook. When we made love, it was like the whole of the earth gasped with us. It became so intense as to be unhealthy, in fact. We broke up about four times between high school and college but never actually had a serious one until this one. THE one. We had the best and worst kind of love-couldn't live with or without each other, and given that we both had problems with depression and he also with alcohol and drug dependancy, it just became dangerous for us to be together. One of us would have committed suicide just to spite the other.
It was December when we broke up. December 4th 2000. Not far from our 5 year anniversary actually. I had graduated college and was doing an internship in New York, he was gradually building up some contacts in the art world. We'd been living together for a year and gone through some arduous times, which I won't go into detail about here. Suffice to say I came home wearied after a stressful day at work to find the place a wreck and Gerard in a drunken rage because he thought someone was trying to rip off one of his ideas. I was not in the mood for the drunken Gee. He was becoming a more frequent visitor and as well as irritating me, he scared me. I had never forgotten the way Gerard attacked me during one such drunken mood when we were 17. It was the first time I remember being completely crushed by a man, something that was later to become an eerily potent part of my life.
I lost it with him. I started yelling and cursing and crying out of utter frustration, and all he did was sit down and drink some more. I remember he wouldn't even look me in the eye, and muttered something about my being too fucking particular, followed by something about how the whole world did not revolve around me. I then cried something incredibly emo (in hindsight), like yours is supposed to! that didn't go down well, and then I was screaming at him to get out of my life because he was too much of a burden and a selfish prick for me to handle.
Well he did. He disappeared for two full days and I was beside myself with worry. I couldn't find him anywhere and no one had seen him. I took to walking the streets, searching vainly through all his usual haunts and places we liked to go together, finding nothing. Oddly enough, this is the first time I remember really bonding with Brian Schechter, who was later to become My Chemical Romance's manager. I knew him already through work but we'd never spoken properly until he bumped into me on the street at about 11pm, completely hysterical, and took me home to calm down. He stayed with me all night and the two of us kept searching the next day. He was there when Gerard finally came home on Sunday evening.
Gerard was in a phase of not liking him at the time; he found him smug and bossy, and let him know that before literally throwing him out the door. I thought he might have calmed down, but when I went to embrace him-completely over my rage the other night-Gerard just cast me off. A little too forcibly, and I fell to the ground. He helped me up before saying the words that set everything in motion.
Rachel. This can't go on.
I remember panicking, asking him what he meant. He looked me in the eye and said it again.
You know what I mean. It can't go on. We can't keep destroying each other. One of us is going to crack.
He's never told me where he was those two days, but I often wonder if, at a time when he was already fragile-hell, we both were-I pushed him to considering the worst act of self-destruction possible. There followed a very deep two hour conversation in which we decided that we had to spend some time apart. I don't think we intended those words to mean breaking up but they were in the back of our minds the whole time. We split apart completely. It was almost fate that I was offered a job in San Francisco the next day. I moved out there after Christmas and left it to Ray to tell Gerard. We rarely spoke for much of the coming year. That was the first time in my life that I knew what it was to be truly broken, hollow, empty. I can trace my current numbness back to those days. I clung to the emptiness to avoid feeling the searing pain that his absence left in my life. It was horrible and unbearable. I couldn't escape into my imaginary worlds for comfort anymore, because he had been in all of them. He had been the most constant and wonderful presence in my life since I was 15 years old. Yet there I was, 23, ostensibly successful and independent but living my life without him. It was traumatising. I had once wondered why people made a big deal out of break ups; now I know you only make a big deal when what you give up was the most precious thing in your life. I think we avoided each other so as to somehow ease the pain we were both going through. We only started making amends after September 11th, when Gerard sent me an e-mail asking me if I wanted to join him in a band. The very madness of that idea almost made me laugh, and I got back to him to say I couldn't. After that, we fell back into our old ways quite quickly. Late night, despairing phone calls and secret parcels in the post. Coded messages and private notes. Once we had our first blistering row as friends (over him dedicating Demolition Lovers, our song, on the album to Kat), I knew we'd manage to salvage the most important thing-our inherent bond.
That had remained steadfast even during my tumultuous relationship with Phil. I remember arguing with Gee when he said he didn't trust him, and I remember having to restrain him from going to punch the daylights out of him when we met for lunch one day and I was sporting an accessory I hadn't expected, in the form of a black eye. He told me about 4000 times to leave him, but I never did. I didn't want to be alone. I looked at Gerard's domestic bliss with Kat and clung vainly to the ideal that Phil and I could have the same thing.
So much for that notion.
Now here we were, years later, and the closeness we'd only fully regained after I left Phil had hit a bum note. It had been going in an obvious direction, but I hadn't reacted to the kiss the way I was supposed to. And I didn't know what to do.
"In vacant or pensive mood, I see!" Andrea literally scared the shit out of me as she flopped down beside me. That twinned with crowd hysteria as Lyn Z stagedived almost made me jump out of my skin.
"Wow! Jesus!"
"You alright?" she asked, laughingly.
"Oh yeah, I'm fine. I just completely drifted off there."
"With that crowd on stage? Look at that Jimmy fella."
Jimmy was in the middle of throwing himself into the crowd alongside Lyn Z.
"He's quite the bundle of energy."
"He's a stud."
Her schoolgirl earnestness made me giggle. That was much needed.
I had always liked Andrea. As mentioned earlier. I'd first met her through Brian, as she was his girlfriend when I first met him in 2000 and remained thus until mid 2005. You talk about ongoing, intense relationships-the two of them were practically married for nigh on 7 years and the fallout when they broke up was like nothing I'd ever seen. Since myself and Gerard, that is. Andrea (who insisted on her full name being used at all times) was also Irish and my kinda woman. She had tour managed MCR on several occasions and also found time to manage Avenged Sevenfold...somehow...though the stress and heartache that unruly mob put her through made you wonder how she put up with them. Don't get me wrong, I love the A7X guys, but they're a bunch of unpredictable lunatics. Particularly on tour. No wonder she refused point blank to ever set foot on a tourbus with them. She'd also taken care of us during one of our early Fallen tours, a rather hazardous one due to recent departures from the band and my increasing resemblance to a punching bag, and the professionalism and thoughtfulness with which she handled everything had permanently enraptured me. I was forever indebted. Not to mention the little something she'd introduced me to during that summer.
A little something named Lyn Z.
The bass player for Mindless Self Indulgence second and Andrea's best and dearest friend first. They'd met at a gig back in 1998 not long after Andrea came over from Ireland and became firm friends, Lyn Z rescuing the latter from homelessness and Andrea introducing the former to the wonders of tattoos. She had more tattoos than anyone I'd ever seen, and that was saying something. She looked at her body as a "blank canvas" to be decorated and enjoyed. But anyway. Lyn Z had tagged along with her friend during some of our US dates and became an instant saviour for me. I remember opening up completely to her one night, about three days after I first met her, just because she was a complete stranger. I felt more comfortable with people I didn't know back then, because I was just learning that affection breeds contempt and violence more than it does anything else. She had listened, shocked and horrified, to all my tales of woe and yet-unlike everyone else-she hadn't begged me on her knees to leave my boyfriend. She just looked me in the eye and said,
You're better than this. I know it doesn't seem like it now, but you have another life beyond this. Those fans out there aren't screaming for the victim. They're screaming for the goddess. And I realise that right now you're hopeless, but the world keeps spinning. One day, you'll wake up and all those feelings will be gone. You'll know what you have to do.
I cried my way through most of the songs that night.
Lyn Z and I kept in contact afterwards. Quite casual contact admittedly, but she was always there for me when I needed her. I remember thinking to myself that only one other person in my life had ever made as much sense as she did that night. I even remember giggling to myself when Andrea confided to me that she thought the two of them would make the perfect couple if ever the two significant others then in the picture bit the dust.
Intriguing notion that.
And yet...
My mind was elsewhere.
Fancy that.
I was sitting on a disused storage crate side stage in the Metro Radio Arena in Newcastle, ostensibly taking in MSI's set but really far, far away. As usual. I had grown up trapped in a maze of reality intertwined with beautiful daydreams, to which I escaped whenever the real world became too much.
A sanctity here
I call home, I run to
When winter descends
Right now, I was blithely oblivious to the concerted efforts of a group of girls in Evanescence t-shirts, stood in the front row, who were trying desperately to catch my attention. I wasn't deliberately ignoring them-I was merely surfing another galaxy in my brain.
Gosh, that was an awful metaphor. Well, I'm trying to sum up the enormity of feeling I was reliving. That's right, not current feeling, memories of it. I was thinking back to the day Gerard and I broke up. All those years ago... It was a Friday. That is, it started on a Friday. That break up was a three day weekend of trauma, misery, and hell, that I had spent an aggregate of years reliving ever since. I'd toyed with the memories, scolded myself for creating them, played with the idea of what would have happened if they never took place. Oh, but I knew what would have happened if they had never taken place. Either Gerard or I would be dead. There was no question about that; our relationship had always been very intense. As in thunderstorm intense. When we fought, the very bowels of the earth shook. When we made love, it was like the whole of the earth gasped with us. It became so intense as to be unhealthy, in fact. We broke up about four times between high school and college but never actually had a serious one until this one. THE one. We had the best and worst kind of love-couldn't live with or without each other, and given that we both had problems with depression and he also with alcohol and drug dependancy, it just became dangerous for us to be together. One of us would have committed suicide just to spite the other.
It was December when we broke up. December 4th 2000. Not far from our 5 year anniversary actually. I had graduated college and was doing an internship in New York, he was gradually building up some contacts in the art world. We'd been living together for a year and gone through some arduous times, which I won't go into detail about here. Suffice to say I came home wearied after a stressful day at work to find the place a wreck and Gerard in a drunken rage because he thought someone was trying to rip off one of his ideas. I was not in the mood for the drunken Gee. He was becoming a more frequent visitor and as well as irritating me, he scared me. I had never forgotten the way Gerard attacked me during one such drunken mood when we were 17. It was the first time I remember being completely crushed by a man, something that was later to become an eerily potent part of my life.
I lost it with him. I started yelling and cursing and crying out of utter frustration, and all he did was sit down and drink some more. I remember he wouldn't even look me in the eye, and muttered something about my being too fucking particular, followed by something about how the whole world did not revolve around me. I then cried something incredibly emo (in hindsight), like yours is supposed to! that didn't go down well, and then I was screaming at him to get out of my life because he was too much of a burden and a selfish prick for me to handle.
Well he did. He disappeared for two full days and I was beside myself with worry. I couldn't find him anywhere and no one had seen him. I took to walking the streets, searching vainly through all his usual haunts and places we liked to go together, finding nothing. Oddly enough, this is the first time I remember really bonding with Brian Schechter, who was later to become My Chemical Romance's manager. I knew him already through work but we'd never spoken properly until he bumped into me on the street at about 11pm, completely hysterical, and took me home to calm down. He stayed with me all night and the two of us kept searching the next day. He was there when Gerard finally came home on Sunday evening.
Gerard was in a phase of not liking him at the time; he found him smug and bossy, and let him know that before literally throwing him out the door. I thought he might have calmed down, but when I went to embrace him-completely over my rage the other night-Gerard just cast me off. A little too forcibly, and I fell to the ground. He helped me up before saying the words that set everything in motion.
Rachel. This can't go on.
I remember panicking, asking him what he meant. He looked me in the eye and said it again.
You know what I mean. It can't go on. We can't keep destroying each other. One of us is going to crack.
He's never told me where he was those two days, but I often wonder if, at a time when he was already fragile-hell, we both were-I pushed him to considering the worst act of self-destruction possible. There followed a very deep two hour conversation in which we decided that we had to spend some time apart. I don't think we intended those words to mean breaking up but they were in the back of our minds the whole time. We split apart completely. It was almost fate that I was offered a job in San Francisco the next day. I moved out there after Christmas and left it to Ray to tell Gerard. We rarely spoke for much of the coming year. That was the first time in my life that I knew what it was to be truly broken, hollow, empty. I can trace my current numbness back to those days. I clung to the emptiness to avoid feeling the searing pain that his absence left in my life. It was horrible and unbearable. I couldn't escape into my imaginary worlds for comfort anymore, because he had been in all of them. He had been the most constant and wonderful presence in my life since I was 15 years old. Yet there I was, 23, ostensibly successful and independent but living my life without him. It was traumatising. I had once wondered why people made a big deal out of break ups; now I know you only make a big deal when what you give up was the most precious thing in your life. I think we avoided each other so as to somehow ease the pain we were both going through. We only started making amends after September 11th, when Gerard sent me an e-mail asking me if I wanted to join him in a band. The very madness of that idea almost made me laugh, and I got back to him to say I couldn't. After that, we fell back into our old ways quite quickly. Late night, despairing phone calls and secret parcels in the post. Coded messages and private notes. Once we had our first blistering row as friends (over him dedicating Demolition Lovers, our song, on the album to Kat), I knew we'd manage to salvage the most important thing-our inherent bond.
That had remained steadfast even during my tumultuous relationship with Phil. I remember arguing with Gee when he said he didn't trust him, and I remember having to restrain him from going to punch the daylights out of him when we met for lunch one day and I was sporting an accessory I hadn't expected, in the form of a black eye. He told me about 4000 times to leave him, but I never did. I didn't want to be alone. I looked at Gerard's domestic bliss with Kat and clung vainly to the ideal that Phil and I could have the same thing.
So much for that notion.
Now here we were, years later, and the closeness we'd only fully regained after I left Phil had hit a bum note. It had been going in an obvious direction, but I hadn't reacted to the kiss the way I was supposed to. And I didn't know what to do.
"In vacant or pensive mood, I see!" Andrea literally scared the shit out of me as she flopped down beside me. That twinned with crowd hysteria as Lyn Z stagedived almost made me jump out of my skin.
"Wow! Jesus!"
"You alright?" she asked, laughingly.
"Oh yeah, I'm fine. I just completely drifted off there."
"With that crowd on stage? Look at that Jimmy fella."
Jimmy was in the middle of throwing himself into the crowd alongside Lyn Z.
"He's quite the bundle of energy."
"He's a stud."
Her schoolgirl earnestness made me giggle. That was much needed.
I had always liked Andrea. As mentioned earlier. I'd first met her through Brian, as she was his girlfriend when I first met him in 2000 and remained thus until mid 2005. You talk about ongoing, intense relationships-the two of them were practically married for nigh on 7 years and the fallout when they broke up was like nothing I'd ever seen. Since myself and Gerard, that is. Andrea (who insisted on her full name being used at all times) was also Irish and my kinda woman. She had tour managed MCR on several occasions and also found time to manage Avenged Sevenfold...somehow...though the stress and heartache that unruly mob put her through made you wonder how she put up with them. Don't get me wrong, I love the A7X guys, but they're a bunch of unpredictable lunatics. Particularly on tour. No wonder she refused point blank to ever set foot on a tourbus with them. She'd also taken care of us during one of our early Fallen tours, a rather hazardous one due to recent departures from the band and my increasing resemblance to a punching bag, and the professionalism and thoughtfulness with which she handled everything had permanently enraptured me. I was forever indebted. Not to mention the little something she'd introduced me to during that summer.
A little something named Lyn Z.
The bass player for Mindless Self Indulgence second and Andrea's best and dearest friend first. They'd met at a gig back in 1998 not long after Andrea came over from Ireland and became firm friends, Lyn Z rescuing the latter from homelessness and Andrea introducing the former to the wonders of tattoos. She had more tattoos than anyone I'd ever seen, and that was saying something. She looked at her body as a "blank canvas" to be decorated and enjoyed. But anyway. Lyn Z had tagged along with her friend during some of our US dates and became an instant saviour for me. I remember opening up completely to her one night, about three days after I first met her, just because she was a complete stranger. I felt more comfortable with people I didn't know back then, because I was just learning that affection breeds contempt and violence more than it does anything else. She had listened, shocked and horrified, to all my tales of woe and yet-unlike everyone else-she hadn't begged me on her knees to leave my boyfriend. She just looked me in the eye and said,
You're better than this. I know it doesn't seem like it now, but you have another life beyond this. Those fans out there aren't screaming for the victim. They're screaming for the goddess. And I realise that right now you're hopeless, but the world keeps spinning. One day, you'll wake up and all those feelings will be gone. You'll know what you have to do.
I cried my way through most of the songs that night.
Lyn Z and I kept in contact afterwards. Quite casual contact admittedly, but she was always there for me when I needed her. I remember thinking to myself that only one other person in my life had ever made as much sense as she did that night. I even remember giggling to myself when Andrea confided to me that she thought the two of them would make the perfect couple if ever the two significant others then in the picture bit the dust.
Intriguing notion that.