Bonus Track: Dreamstate

Green...

Matt.

You'll never read this. And that's for the best. You gave me a gift that you'll never know about. You gave me hope. Hope that I'm not some burnt out remnant of a person with no thoughts or feelings. It had been over a decade since I'd felt anything for another person, and you showed me I still could.

That's a bittersweet feeling for a couple of reasons. For one, you're straight, so I'm repeating old habits, but secondly, you're actually sort of not a person. This took me way way too long to realise. You're actually private to the point of generic. We shared a common interest and fell into each others lives at the perfect time during the pandemic. We liked the same sorts of games and there was no one else who kept our schedules, so we spent a lot of time together, and you were (are) an asshole to everyone, so those fleeting moments when you shared something with me or remembered something I told you felt much bigger than they actually were in reality.

I fell in love with a version of you that doesn't exist. I made up a person that doesn't exist and pursued it. I created a character that I could fall for safely, gave it all the right traits and convinced myself if I played to a script it would eventually reveal itself.

I dreamed up the version of you that I love.

The real you is awesome. I couldn't have done it alone, you do genuinely connect with me occasionally, but it's not magical, it's just occasionally connecting with an acquaintance over the internet.

The person I love doesn't exist and never did.

I love this song. This song feels like the perfect culmination of our story together and you're almost not even in it. Writing it was the easiest thing I've ever had to do. 

Bonus Track: Dreamstate

The Keeper: Where Do I Go Now?

My current outlook is in flux. Things feel harder than they used to. I need to really listen to the words in my song or I'm going to lose time. I forge on, hoping I find some light to hold on to.

It's still possible, right?

Do I still have any light left to share? Have I kept any?

12. Keeper

Two Truths One Heart: A Story of Empty Success

2019-2022. What a time period. We all went through it. I spent a long time recovering from brain surgery, and made the decision that if I wanted to move forward with my life that I needed to forge a new path.

I enrolled back to Uni in 2019, wanting to prove that I still had the brains to succeed. I chose a path related to my talents and forged a path forward. Then Ned moved out with his new partner during Covid. It wasn't abandonment, it was another stage of his life, but it felt like abandonment. I thought I wouldn't survive without someone to keep me from the darkest parts of myself. But I did. I had to, this is the path I've chosen and I have to be able to stand alone.

I had a goal, and I half-heartedly pursued it. It fit poorly, but I was good at it. I graduated. I did well. I didn't work as hard as I could have, and forged a path for myself in a new industry. It still fits poorly and I'm still good at it.

Two things can be true.

11. Two Truths

Losing Ground - Everything Falling Apart

A lot happened in 2016. I'd finally worked my way through to having good adult friends who shared my hobbies and had my back. My older friendships were still present and welcome parts of my life, and I'd finally found a job I enjoyed and was financially stable.

But as things tend to do in this process, things fell apart. The company I worked for collapsed, my friendship group imploded due to interpersonal issues and I had a brain related health scare that led to a long recovery and feelings of intense loneliness and introspection.

I remember during this time, I would spend long periods of time trapped on my balcony, staring out at the city at night.

The song takes a darker turn, I'm sorry, but this was a challenging time for me, and I didn't have a lot of light to look for or rely on. Everyone was busy with their own lives.

I remember the endless empty beautiful nights. And I remember the feelings. This is where my youth started to feel distant and the colours really started to fade.

10. Losing Ground

Breakdown - Directionless in Brisbane

 At some point after I moved to The Big City, I started to realise that a lot of the things I wanted from my life weren't happening for me. I didn't have a career, I didn't have a relationship and I didn't really have any idea how to get either.

There was a catalyst. A year after I'd moved, Nell and Dan moved out, leaving me with the others I'd moved with. It felt like abandonment, even though it wasn't. We all needed to grow, but at the time, it felt like I'd made a horrible mistake moving across country only to lose my people again. I'd been fighting with my other housemates and it all just felt hopelessly dark.

I was very introspective during this time. Things got dark. There wasn't a lot of talking or honesty about feelings, just me realising how little I had for me when confronted by all the things everyone else had.

One night, it all culminated in a moment at a pier on the Brisbane River. It was a breakdown, just a very me-coded one.

9. Breakdown

Nell

 Hey beautiful.

There is no-one else in my life, save perhaps my Grandmother, who has so effortless amplified the light inside of me. I adore her in ways I can't express, songs and words included.

So instead of trying to contextualise one of the most important friendships of my entire life, I want to take this opportunity to share a short story.

I wrote this song when I was 21, well before I had the ability to action it. I sang it into a stick microphone and gave it to Nell as a 19th birthday present. She won't remember this, but revamping it and giving it the feelings it deserves felt like the perfect tribute to her.

8. Beautiful

What's So Bad About Being Me? The Million Dollar Question

I almost want to link back to a post I made about this part of my journey directly, but this is for reflection, not dwelling. One of my nearest and dearest friends in high school called me and essentially ended my friendship one day because someone pretending to be me was mean to her over the phone and she wouldn't believe that I wouldn't do it. 

I was away at uni in my second year when this friendship blew up, and I was finally starting to settle into the person I would become. I had stable friends, was enjoying my studies and felt safe, and the combination punch of this betrayal and the absurdity of the reason for it left me reeling and feeling powerless.

I remember calling Nell in tears that night asking why shit like this happens to me. It was a bit of a pity party, but the overwhelming feeling of being abandoned again made me angry for one of the few times in my life. It was painful, but galvanising.

I might be damaged goods by this point in the process, but I know who I am and what I stand for. I was burned so much as a kid that by the time I was staring down the barrel of adulthood, I was ready to fight for myself this one time.

7. What's So Bad

Challenges: Daniel's Song

 History repeats itself here. As it is wont to do. 

There are elements of my life that I feel the need to open to the world. I'm not someone who is open with myself. I've always feared that being too open would force people away from me. History taught me to be cautious about it. This project was an attempt to fight that instinct.

The story of Daniel and I is a private one. I loved him in a romantic way, and I sort of want to leave it at that. We had a very tumultuous and challenging relationship. I was young, stupid and caused things to end when they probably didn't need to.

The notes in the song speaks for itself, there's not much left to say. Beyond the music, this one I keep for me.

6. Challenges

Hey Ned: Mirrors

There are two paths in this song, for a very important person in my life that has been around for long enough to have a very complex set of experiences and feelings. It’s impossible to summarise all of those feelings here. If you do some archeology on the blog, you can actually follow some of the context in real time, but I’ll try and provide as much guidance as I can.

Ned was my first true straight boy crush. I refuse to believe that there is a gay person on this earth who hasn’t experienced this during some point in their lives. Some might have even taken the pathway that I did and enveloped in their own hubris thought they could change fate and change someone’s truth to get them to fall in love with you. This doesn’t work. It took a lot of time to realise that.

In this man I have a lifelong friend that I’ve sacrificed for, supported, treated horribly, fought for, fought with, dodged, chased, loved and hated. This is not a one note story - and I will not treat it as such. This is going to break a rule I had for this part of the project, but it’s not fair to run it any other way.

I’ve always followed my truth. And if this is where the Lost Histories make their appearance, so be it. Truth here, if nowhere else.

5. Mirrors

5x. Hey Ned  

Play Pretend: The Diary of a People Pleaser

I’m not even a recovering people pleaser, I’m an addict that has no intention of changing. I still get regularly roasted for this behaviour by people in my life that don’t know why I do it.

It doesn’t take a psychologist to connect the dots here. I’ve been abandoned by so many people in my life, starting with my mother, and several friend groups growing up. This feeling was (and to a lesser degree, still is) the motivation for always trying desperately to put myself in situations where I was impressing or entertaining others. If I stayed interesting, people wouldn’t leave me.

Enter roleplaying. We had a teacher during high school that introduced my group of friends and I to tabletop roleplaying games. It was part acting, part game, and very addictive. And through it, I found a lifelong love, but it also fed into my need to please people. I loved it, and still do, but the role of the entertainer is a mask that we wear to avoid making connections. When all we have is The Game, we aren’t being our authentic selves. All I had was games for a really long time, and somewhere along the way I lost who I was without it.

But hey, at least I have the memories right? So let’s play pretend.

4. Play Pretend

Uh-oh: The Engayefecation

I was never your typical child. I was a sensitive, precocious and dramatic young boy with a real desire to keep people entertained and interested in me so that they wouldn’t leave my life like my mother did. I had followed my grandparents into religion, and loved the music and pageantry of it, so it came as a bit of a shock when it turned out that I liked men. 

I remember having a lightning bolt epiphany one day whilst at church when I saw a boy from school and I remember thinking he was hot. Light shining through those dusty old Stations of the Cross illuminated my future and it all sort of looked a bit like my past. It didn’t seem right to me. I was meant to serve the Church, but I also knew what I was and truly believed after all the indoctrination that I was made in God’s image, so this was it, this was the path I was taking.

1997 was a different era to what it is today, especially in deeply conservative country Australia. My orientation would go on to cause me no end of trouble growing up, but I never really feared or hated it, at least those aren’t the feelings that I remember, just quiet acceptance.

It took me a long time to tell my family about it though. Piece by piece, people in my life were either told by me or gradually worked it out (at least those that didn’t suspect it, I was never especially subtle, despite thinking for sure I was blokey enough to pass).

It wasn’t an easy road, but I never resented myself for it. Only other people. I think that helped me keep walking forward.

3. Uh-oh The Lost Histories leak through again here. I wasn't lying when I said it lead to endless trouble. Things got dark for a while there, darker than they've ever been since. If I didn't tell that part of the story, I wouldn't be able to say that I told the whole truth of this time. I now see that I'm stronger for the unique person that I am, but at 15, it didn't feel like that.

3x. Darkest Days

The Circle: Four as One

It’s not important for the project, but I had a pretty challenging childhood, and I had a lot of trouble with friends betraying me and choosing to move on from me in cruel ways. I’m not here to dwell on that.

When I found my people, I discovered a group whose interests and experiences aligned with my own, and forged long-term friendships, some lifelong, which carried me through some of the most challenging parts of my life.

The four of us could not have been more different. Each had their own strengths and weaknesses, but the important part of our story is that we learned to be men around each other. We grew and experienced the world in technicolour, learning who we were in the blazing sun of our home.

These were formative chapters in my story, each of them forming a part of who I became. Even though I do not travel the same road as each of them, I love them all for who they were to me.

Blessed be.

There is another hidden path here as well, at least one that can be shared. I already broke a rule later in the process, so a little more Lost History leaks out here. It's all a part of the process.

2. The Circle

Desire is a dangerous thing in unformed minds. It's like a fire you can't control, no matter how much you might want to. If you lose control of it, you can burn those around you and even yourself.

2x. Inner Fire

Sunlit Days and Starlit Nights

Memories of my childhood really have faded with age. I used to scoff at my elders and think it would be possible with my mind to keep moments of time in glass forever and be able to look back on them when I wanted, but the further away from my life and times as a child, the less resolution I can see my life with.

It really comes down to feelings. I had a great childhood in a lot of ways, and it was challenging in others. One constant in my life, and the meaning behind the title, was the endless light that shone from within the people who raised me.

Kind, warm, community minded people who gave the twilight years of their lives to raising a child they didn’t choose to have. I am biased, and I know they weren’t perfect people, but they gave me stability and shared their light with me from my first day until their last days. No one could ask for more than that.

In the place I was raised, I grew my mind, learned what commitment and hard work looks like, and found shelter from the dark days to come.

I am, and always will be grateful for the life I have been afforded thanks to them.

1. Sunlit Days