waiting in a car
“waiting in a car
waiting for a ride in the dark”
-M83, “Midnight City”
Every time this song comes on, I’m back. Back in that hotel room in Bangkok, alone, bouncing off the walls, dancing to this song, feeling so fucking alive and hungry. Hungry for life. Hungry for touch. Hungry for her.
“Midnight City” has an incredible video but for now I want you to forget all about that, because the video is about one thing and the song is about something else. The song is about sleek, modern isolation, the insulated isolation of sitting in a car in a city alone, the sounds of the world outside muffled and distant. It’s night. There’s neon. Neon and solitude and yearning.
Is this supposed to be a metaphor for the way we live our lives now? The isolation of the modern world? I don’t know. It’s a good enough analogy for my life though, I suppose. My own cool, insulated, urban isolation. A placid surface with desperate yearning invisible underneath.
On last week’s episode of Killing Eve, the psychopathic assassin Villanelle had to pretend to be an addict and attend a support group to connect with someone who could lead her to the person she was hunting. Her first day was a disaster, because all Villanelle knows how to do is pretend and the person running the group saw right through her bullshit. So the next day she said something more true.















To which the group administrator responds:

I certainly can. But what puzzles me so much, even all these years later, when memories bring me back to that hotel room in Bangkok is how alive I felt. Physically, intellectually, sexually. I was fully in my body and my body was fully alive. Now, most of the time, I don’t feel much of anything except insulated isolation, painful loneliness, and somewhere deep, deep under the placid surface, a powerful yearning for connection. But I know, I KNOW that I’m capable of feeling something else, of inhabiting my body, of not feeling driven out of my own skin by insecurity and doubt and shame and fear, of laughing from a real place and crying from a real place, of touching and being touched in ways that I truly feel. How do I get it back? How do I get it back?! There has to be a way. I don’t want to go the rest of my life not really feeling anything.
Was it her? I think maybe it was her. Maybe it was the memory of her touch, the memory of being held by her, that was still warming my skin and coursing through my body some weeks later, when I was in Thailand. But now it’s been years and years and years since I’ve known the touch of anyone who inspired my love the way she did. How are we supposed to keep feeling things when there is no connection in our lives into which we can pour our feelings? Feelings that are just our own, that aren’t part of something shared, can only stagnate and die. But so few people can make me feel the way she did.
So I’m still waiting in a car, seemingly comfortable but actually mad with the restless desire to feel something real, a real connection to another. Waiting for a ride in the dark. Or, if you prefer, I’m still dancing on my own in a hotel room in Bangkok to “Midnight City” by M83, waiting for someone great to come along, see something worthwhile in me, and give me a real chance.
Notes
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