In the heart of the YouTuber.
Love knows neither class nor taste. Not in the humans for whom we fall. Not in the music which we fall to.
As alternative as one may profess their aural preferences to be, and however minimal or voracious their appetite for popular culture – it takes but one listen during a particularly unbridled wave of romantic giddiness for a previously unheard, dismissed, or even scorned pop song to latch on to our hearts and become the soundtrack of our most recent infatuation.
Hence, the reason why I danced around my kitchen listening to Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream” 37 times in a row one evening last July.
I had just been on my first date with a boi guised Dishes and was perusing his Facebook profile ever so obsessively. Below his photo he had typed the title of Perry’s aforementioned hit. Yet, because my radio dial rarely reads anything but 89.9 KCRW, those words meant nothing to me…until I typed them into the YouTube search field.
Then they meant EVERYTHING.
I don’t really wear make-up
And of course I’m funny
Even when I tell the punch line wrong
ButohmyGawd; he thinks I’m PRETTY!
And he actually gets me. I know he gets me. So I WILL let my walls come down, dowww-owww-own.
Before I met him – two weeks ago – yeah…I was alright
But yes, things were kinda heavy; he fucking brought me back to LIFE.
Now six months from now in February, he’ll TOTES be my valentine! My first VALENTIIINE!
Or so I thought and sang at the time.
Alas, Dishes will never send me any handwritten, heart-shaped letters of devotion, as I did not get another chance to let him put his hands on me in my skin-tight jeans or get drunk on the beach together, much less fuck him in a fort that we built out of bed sheets.
In fact, he publicly rejected me the second time I ever attempted to see him. And a mere 15 minutes later our (albeit unbeknownst to him) song began to play. FLEE, though everyone’s first instinct would be, my friend Joseph forced me to remain on the dance floor, a bear’s length away from Dishes and his posse.
Painfully ironic though that may sound, it did not actually exacerbate the heartbreak and humiliation I had just endured; but rather prompted the realization – and continues to do so every time I hear “Teenage Dream” – that no matter how many more Dishes morph into douches, I am finally ready to allow myself to fall in love.
Of course, even when there are no regrets, few if any can escape such a situation completely unscathed. However large they may be, however long we allow them to fester – there is bound to be a wound and eventually we must address it. Only then can the healing and new growth begin.
Some scarring is inevitable. Sure. But like all remnants of emotional anguish – past, present, and future – it is a sacrifice worthy of the knowledge we obtain in exchange.
“Love Is A Battlefield,” after all. And so long as we carry on, there WILL be a day when “One Life Stand” replaces “Why Don’t You Love Me” as our amorous anthem.
