about the party by Kamal.; Somethings are just not meant to be
It is said that if you walk into a church at the right hour, the right morning and with the right desperacy, you will always walk out with your arms full of whatever blessing that your eager hearts can ever want, or at least enough for you to know that there is something besides your waiting for you to call out his name for help.
I say help, and I don’t mean the kind of helping that someone counts or may recall in moments when they’re help loses worth; what I mean is the kind of help that is the need of the moment, not necessarily what you may desire.
I’ve been in love before. I’ve seen my people chew a name for so long that it breaks their jaws so that they’re tongues refuse to utter any other name in its place. I say ‘my people’ and mean the people with broken hearts and busted lips — those who sit up in their beds staring into a glowing phone screen wishing the birth of some love with someone who is not willing to love them back. Those who blow smoke sitting at the edge of their beds from their bedroom windows, leaning into an unforgiving cold night that stole their dreams of love and replaced them with nightmares — I say my people, and merely mean those who go to church not for worldly fortune but for love. For what gives them every meaning and hope to stay in a place that is inhospitable and jarring enough to kill the very thing that has kept us all here for generations; hope.
When I say love, I don’t merely mean the romantics of two lovers; but also how a joke in a whatsapp group of old highschool friends can shrink the distance they’ve developed since they last met, I mean the way a girls sleepover can also become a dance party and then also a church where grief and guilt are shared and accepted. I mean the love that gathers a family to a dinner table every night, to share a meal they could or could not easily afford.
I stumbled on Kamal. a week ago, when his song ‘blue’ was in my spotify recommendations. And if I’m being honest, and if everything about myself is not still aching, I felt connected to that song from the heart, I felt lucid and hopeless. I felt alone. And in that loneliness, a familiar sound of grief took me away from remembering the face of someone I wished dead.
The irony of it all is that ‘blue’ was not even about lost love. Blue had a deeper meaning to it. But the way we consume art is not predictable. I learnt this when I heard Godspeed by Frank Ocean as a slow pour of love and it turned out to be about the dark cloud of childhood. This is the part where I recommend that you play the song, and let it pour over you.
‘About the party’ is another song that I’ve grown to enjoy even if there is very little that I relate to. But the part where Kamal goes:
I don’t stick around if its bad vibes
Tell her don’t trip like she’s had a bad high
Yeah I’m ruthless but I’m not a bad guy
And the truth is, that you have my hands tied
I felt most connected here. I think that we aren’t bad. We aren’t meant to be bad. We don’t decide to be bad. We are molded by our experiences. We are criticised and ruthlessly accused of what we think is right and that which others think isn’t. In this world of lovelessness, we are left alone, we are told to keep our love to ourselves and then, we adapt. We recite the mantra and begin telling ourselves that there is no love that can feed our hunger, there is no love that can tell us our hearts exists. I for one did not let this happen to me. I decidedly did not mold myself, did not fit in. In school I was the one who was decidedly not part of the cool kids because the cool kids treated our friends wrong. I was never influenced by what was hip but was influenced by what made me feel comfortable.
And so, as Kamal says:
I don’t give a fuck about the party,
I just want the people here to love me,
Music muffled through the wall like a movie scene,
I’m just tryna to see my name up on the movie screen.
I just seek acceptance, as do you, reader. I know that everything you ever wished for is not granted, I know you have made peace with that. I know you want to be as inadequate as you can in this world — a world that is poisoned by your people — and its okay if you aren’t. I’ve realized that there are people like us, misfits, who have nothing to wish for other than love.
