the coldplay post I wanted to be able to write when I was twelve

When I was in middle school, the boy I adored (and thought I loved) was into Coldplay, so I studied their discography. Immersion-learning everything that mattered to the people whose love I wanted, training myself to inherit their perspectives and their interests — this came naturally to me. 

Mylo Xyloto came out in October of sixth grade. I remember really not getting it at first. And then coming back to it over and over again, searching it for beauty, hunting for whatever Coldplay Boy had found to love in this music. I thought that maybe if I mined enough, I'd uncover some detail I could use to accessorize my personality until I resembled something he'd love. "Us Against the World" and "Up With the Birds" were the best songs on the album as far as I could tell; they illustrated the loneliness I felt. Unrequited love will do a lot to a twelve year old. 

With time, the music grew on me. I found myself playing the album late at night while I texted my cousin and tinkered away at school projects. And one night it just clicked. I got it. Coldplay was good. I'm not really sure how that happened; I bet I'd just gotten used to hearing it.

I think I was maybe fourteen when Ghost Stories came out. I was in high school then, having migrated well beyond my obsession with Coldplay Boy, past a baseball-playing eighth grader and a star sophomore on the high school wrestling team, onto a guy at church who liked frisbee golf and playing street hockey in roller blades. I had liked a lot of boys at that point, but none of these crushes ever fruited into relationships that gave me real experience with heartbreak or guilt or fucking up irredeemably. So I listened to "Ink" and "True Love" and felt around inside the empty space that was supposed to hold the feelings these songs were written to soothe. I wondered when I'd know these feelings myself; I knew deep down that all of these crushes had been thought exercises more than anything else. And it confused me that there could be so much dimension and variety in an album about Chris and Gwyneth's relationship ending — why wasn't it all just horribly, flatly, invariably sad? How had this grown man done so many regretful things to someone he wanted to be with so badly?

Tonight I'm sleeping in Massachusetts, in my dear friend's childhood home. She's just finished getting surgery, and I'm here to keep her company and aggressively prevent her from doing shit like lifting objects that weigh more than a paperback book. I laid down to write, and it was going to be a stream of consciousness about the loose confetti of observations I'd collected over the course of the day, but I for some reason had "Magic" stuck in my head, and then I really wanted to hear the album. And so I paused my Emma Chamberlain video. I stretched on the bed in the dark, as I do every night, and I listened to Ghost Stories, starting from the top. And I noticed that empty space that I used to feel had been filled.