So Long, Avalon

I must have been ten or eleven when I first heard Anthony Green’s voice. The album was Circa Survive’s 2007 On Letting Go, and I would write that title in sharpie on my arms. I had an impossible amount of grief already clenched inside of me, and I thought letting go meant pretending it didn’t exist. I looked away from my own grief and into the grief of others instead, maybe to normalize my own or maybe to convince myself that I wasn’t as sad as everyone else I knew.

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To be honest, I didn’t have language around grief until very recently. I knew that I was home to a family of fears, and I treated them like anything else. I ignored them, I pretended they didn’t exist. When I was 19, I moved to Seattle to live in a minivan with a man too old for me as an attempt to live out a fantasy as a dirtbag climber. He was broken, I was obviously going to be the one to fix him. He introduced me to a community of people who stifled their fears like I did.

Cishet men in their late twenties and thirties who presented fear like it was an obstacle to destroy with a bulldozer. We put ourselves in situations where fear couldn’t become an option — Standing on a ledge realizing the next anchor point was further away than the length of rope we had with us. Running out the next gear placement, knowing one slip would end in a concussion at the very least. We would push through, we willed our shaking bones into submission. Most of the time we survived, but many of us didn’t.

The deaths of climbers in my community felt eerily similar to the deaths I had known as a result of addiction. As someone who could become so obsessed with a dangerous high, I often wanted to see how close to death I could get before backing down. My body usually got in the way, though. Whether it was my sheer lack of testosterone or hardened tendons, or more frequently it was something that originated inside of me.

In therapy, we are working diligently to identify the parts of my internal family system. Yesterday, we talked to a new part that gained its longterm voice in my head during this dirtbag era. This part, like many of my parts, has assumed a role of survival in ways that don’t apply as frequently as they used to. This part doesn’t want me to feel fear, this part berates me for letting the symptoms of fear keep me from doing things, this part speaks to me with the language of shame because it assumes that’s the only way I will listen. This part is usually correct, but I continue to grow out of crisis. This part has kept me alive.

When I was a teenager, my friend Izzy’s mom would drive us to Anthony Green’s solo shows in Portland. We felt so grown in the city, and Anthony gave me a kind of inner peace akin to being seen by a loving father. He would always come out after the shows and talk to his fans, and we stayed to talk with him every time as Izzy’s mom idled in the loading zone. He was so honest for a public figure. His lyrics never shied away from the darkness of grief and heartbreak and addiction and fear, and I didn’t know how seen I felt by his writing.

Over the years, I’ve revisited Anthony’s work but it’s been a couple of years. The other day, the song Slowing Down (Long Time Coming) from his solo album Avalon played on my liked songs playlist, and I was transported back to Izzy’s bedroom singing,

I never wanted it to feel like this,
to be this way
I’m just afraid that if you stay,
we’ll never change
I never wanted it to be like this,
to feel this way
I’m just afraid that if you stay, you’ll hate me

It was that or screaming the single line of She Loves Me So at the top of our lungs, AND MAKE SURE ALL THOSE MOTHER FUCKIN’ BOYS KNOW! SHE LOVES ME SO!

Grief can boil up like that, and I’ve been stoking the fire underneath the grief pot since well before Fleetwood died. I was curious what else Anthony had done since I last checked in. Circa had disbanded and he was a part of a new band, L.S. Dunes with band members from My Chemical Romance and Coheed and Cambria. He had also released two solo albums. One album, Boom. Done. was released the year he allegedly died for eight minutes after a heroin overdose, the same year I got sober. Then, this year in June, he released a redux of Avalon. The new title is So Long, Avalon. I thought about what it would be like to write those words across my top surgery scars in ink. Like a memorial to my teenage self. Avalon, a mythological island thought of as a paradise for the dead.

I shared my love of Anthony with another friend, SJ. I met SJ when I was 16 running the spotlight for the community theater production of R.E.N.T. She was in the ensemble, and carried one of the most beautiful solos I had ever heard in Seasons of Love. She was tattooed from the neck down in song lyrics, many of them written by Anthony. We would drive to Portland in her blue Ford Focus and sing along to Drug Dealer (Avalon) and Stop the Fu*king Car (Juturna). She had a basket of shaker eggs, tambourines, and maracas that I always wanted to recreate in my own car, though I still haven’t.

My sister and her husband are big Circa fans as well, though less hyperfixated on Anthony and more into the other incredible artists in the band and their side projects. When I was no longer in touch with Izzy or SJ, I was able to continue going to Circa shows with my sister. There was something about this band that wove a spiritual connection between me and whoever I was standing in that musty music hall with.

In So Long, Avalon Anthony showcases a much more sober and refined version of an acoustic album fueled by heroin and angst. The production value is higher, the lyrics are tweaked slightly to reflect a more current version of himself. When I was a teenager, he became a dad. I remember when his first kid was born, he didn’t stop talking and writing songs about being a dad. There was a shift in him, like many members of early 2000s post-hardcore bands, he had a family now. Something to live for when living for himself had little appeal.

My friend Jeff had just had a baby when he died in an avalanche in Alaska. He was such a beloved member of the Seattle climbing community, everything about him was joyful and ambitious. His child was only months old, he was already such an amazing parent.

I have so much fear that my own kid will have to experience even more grief. He was two when Fleetwood died, and they were only just beginning to know and love each other. In January, he’ll be five and it will have over two years since the day of death. What amazes me is how much my kid remembers these little details about Fleetwood. Memories they made together, memories that have been etched by the hot metal of the grief. I wonder what will evoke those lifelong scars when he’s my age.

Like me, my kid has a lot of questions about death and dying. He came to work at the funeral home with me on Halloween, a perk of working for a family-owned business. One of the funeral directors asked if he wanted to see a closed casket. His eyes were wide looking at the lacquered hardwood. He asked what was inside, I told him there was a dead woman inside. Then he asked why we have big TVs in the chapel, and I said families look at pictures of the person they love who died. He asked if there would be pictures of Fleetwood up there.

The grief is still all tangled up, and I don’t know if I should be letting go or holding on. My natural response is to always be in a state of bracing for impact, anticipating the news of another loved one dying in an unexpected way because if I anticipate it then I won’t have to go through the shock phase. I know that it doesn’t work like that, but my body is still catching up on that news.

When I fall back into these old special interest time holes, it becomes apparent that the grief of that time still pulls on this knot, each loss a new direction to try to detangle. If I could take it out of me, I’d mail it to a stranger from reddit who loves detangling messy threads and see if it’s ever returned, wound in an orderly way. Even then, the yarn would hold onto the memory of the tangle. The funky bends and curves stored in its genetic makeup.

What I have left out is that when I listened to Anthony Green as a teenager, I thought a lot about my own death. I got closer to finding the cleanest, least devastating way to reach it. It is a privilege to have that choice. A friend recently described me as “someone who is not consenting to being alive” and it is true that I have to give into the sick submission of staying here despite it all.

On the final song of So Long, Avalon, Devil’s Song (This Feels Like a Nightmare) Anthony’s kids sing in the round,

We’re all still in the same spot
We’re all still in the same spot
We’re all still in the same spot
We’re all still in the same spot
We’re all still in the same spot...
This feels like a nightmare...

When I wake up each morning, I write down my dreams. Sometimes I get stuck in the dream, well aware of the artificiality of my surroundings but incapable of ending it. I thank my brain for its insistence on whatever that message was, and I am grateful for waking up. For the headphones that put me in the time machine. For the boys who taught me how to override my fear. For my therapist who says thank you to that part, and asks me remind the part that we aren’t on the side of a cliff anymore. For Anthony Green for validating that sometimes it’s fucking hard to be here, but we still get to be here. For normalizing the darkness that showcases the brightest light.

So we can begin again
So we can begin
So we can begin again
So we can begin

Like my kid told me so casually the other night, we are here until we’re old and we die. And then we become a person again, and then we die, and then we become a person again.

I have spent a lot of my days disconnected from my own personhood. Each day I stay alive with that kid, with these pieces of nostalgia and maps of grief, I fulfill the cycle I am in regardless of my consent. I am slowly becoming a person again.

In loving memory of Jeff Cheng, Ryan Kautz, and Alex Reed.