Almost Famous & The Heart Rate of a Mouse
The world
is such a big, big place, and we have been here for so very long. My favorite
iconic time was the first decade of the twenty-first century. Lots of changes,
lots of sins and tragedies and revolutionary moments. Millions of people living
a million different lives.
At one end of those years sits Almost Famous (2000) and at the other sits The Heart Rate of a Mouse, a fanfiction posted by Anna Green in March of 2010.
Now, this is the part where I promise not to make this more personal than it needs to be (oops).
My best friend has asked me before how I love things with the kind of intensity that I do. How do I let myself be carried away by the things I love, let them reshape me, undo me, rebuild me? She’s told me that the fact that I do it at all is something admirable, and most of the time I never know what to say.
I guess the best way to put it is that I love things like a soldier in a war, and I will fight that war until there is nothing left to fight for and then a little longer. It is not that I have any greater capacity for love than anyone else, it’s not this grand thing that only I can do. It is simply that I am too relentless.
I've watched my favorite show every year since I was seven years old, I've written about the same blond boy since the third grade, I've listened to a single song for days on end simply because I loved it so much. I have repeated and relapsed and rewound and rewatched. I feel and feel and tear my heart apart and sometimes there is this ringing in my fingers, this electrical buzz, as if my body is not enough to contain it all. I find no words in any language for how much my own heart weighs on me.
For years being the way I am, wearing everything I feel on the outside like a bruise or a black eye, has created an endless amount of pain for me. It destroyed and isolated me. But the older I get, the better I become at letting things pass and at regulating my own feelings, so I do not obsess over them, so I do not suffocate myself.
And I have decided that feeling things as deeply and strongly as I do is as much a blessing as it is a curse, so I will make the best of it with as much wisdom as I can manage. All those times I worried myself physically ill over what I felt, I was also learning the range of my love and the power it carries. If we only get so much sweetness in this life then I am simply not willing to leave a single drop behind.
Isn't love what makes the world go round and round, anyway? People get to create art and share it with others. People get to be moved by films and music and paintings, all made by someone else's hands. People get to write poetry and read it to each other. They get to make music and play it for thousands of people.
My first concert was Louis Tomlinson's Walls tour in 2022 and it was one of the most formative experiences I’ve had. The second time I saw him, at the end of the set, he played a song with the line: “You smile at me and say it's time to go, but I don't feel like going home.” How are we supposed to go home after a concert when that's the only place we've ever found one? I didn't know a single person around me, and not one of them knew me but we were all there for the same thing. We all cried the same tears and screamed the same lyrics. I felt it just as much as the person standing beside me did.
Fandoms exist because people get to do all of these things, because we get to ask each other: What do you like? What don't you like? What did you think of it? And oh, that was my favorite part too!!!
Recently I've been thinking about this a lot and I couldn't explain to myself why I kept returning to this film and this novel. I wasn't sure why whenever I tried to understand this particular feeling, these were the stories that popped in my head. But upon revisiting them, I began to understand one simple truth: to love something beyond yourself is a gift, and to discover that it is loved by someone else is communion.
When you're sad or happy, you want someone to know someone tangible who can make the sadness more bearable or the happiness more real. To give and receive that comfort matters, to share your soul with another person is to defy our finiteness.
For Brendon and Ryan’s relationship in The Heart Rate of a Mouse, this applies too. What they are both seeking can only be found in the other. But to confide in someone, to trust them, is to hand over a piece of yourself. Truth begets intimacy and intimacy requires vulnerability. And we are all terrified of the cost.
On one hand Brendon ran away from a home where he was punished for being himself and spent all his life expecting that same hurt everywhere else. On the other hand, Ryan never really had a home but he searched for one in Mrs. Roscoe, he searched again in Spencer and in The Followers but that was taken away too.
So when they meet, they recognize something in each other they haven't found elsewhere and Brendon is so convinced that he does not deserve what he wants, that he settles for what he gets. He stays with Shane because Shane is safe and wanting more feels ungrateful, wanting Ryan means risking the stable life he has built, but that life is not honest, it’s not a home.
Not like the Chelsea Hotel was, not like sleeping on Ryan’s bed on the way from Omaha to Denver was.
"Maybe I've just wanted a break or to finally like myself or to find something stupid and childish like a home."
Ryan says this after being outed. He has spent the entire novel circling that truth, disguising it as anger and resentment, but what he wants is somewhere to come back to, somewhere to stay. Somewhere to be known and to belong.
I guess that's what this entire entry is about: there are desires in my heart that I still struggle to say out loud. Like Ryan, I find myself circling them too but the truth is all my life I have been disarmed by the idea of belonging. Not simply feeling like I belong somewhere but knowing it too. Having a group of people you can look at and say: these are my people and I am theirs. Maybe that's why religion is so compelling.
If Adam was created in the image of God and Eve was created from his rib, doesn't that suggest that we all share some deep desire that originated in the Creator Himself? Wasn't He looking for something in those first two people that we still look for every day? Community & belonging.
A place only becomes a home in the presence of family, either chosen or given. God belongs to us like we belong to Him simply because He seeks our presence too, He performs for us too. Every act of devotion is reciprocal.
Think of Audrey in the second volume Wolves vs. Hearts. There is that scene where Shane and Ryan get stuck in an elevator while the power is out across New York. Later, when Ryan walks to his apartment and finds Audrey sitting on the steps, he wonders whether groupies (Band-Aids, Ryan, be respectful) have homes at all. If when they retire they strip from all the glitter on their skin and return to some ordinary place waiting for them.
He never asks but instead decides that whether she does or doesn't is inconsequential because at the end of the day, she belongs there with him. On that tour bus and at the side of the stage. This is what she does, but more importantly, it is who she is. It's where she is worshipped as much as she worships them back. Ryan understands that neither of them would exist the same way without the other.
Much like God and us. An exchange of selves, a constant offering of one piece of me for one piece of you. And it's complex and it's difficult.
I think for the longest time I carried a pit-sized hole in my chest. I turned into a cynic because I looked at all of these things and concluded that love was only a performance. If every love is tinged with the knowledge that it doesn’t last an eternity, that nothing is an always, then isn’t it selfish to even give it? I thought if the museum always closed its doors and emptied, if the lights were always going to turn off and there was no one to love with, to love for or to love on behalf of then love did not really matter as much.
But I know that’s not true now.
My proof is Miss Penny Lane herself. She takes the photographs and inspires the music and knows the words to every song (especially the bad ones, mostly the bad ones) better than the artists themselves. Her devotion makes her as important as the man holding the guitar. The band onstage, her and every fan in the audience are all participating in the same act of love.
But then we get that moment where she is standing alone in the Cleveland auditorium with wrappers and papers scattered across the floor. The show is over and the music has stopped. She is not being loved by anyone in that moment and she is not loving anyone either. The lights are out and it is time to go home, there is no song left to sing and no one left to sing it to.
Penny is alone in an empty venue, and this is for no one but herself.
I have tried countless times to get my sister to read The Heart Rate of a Mouse, but she never does and my brother never wants to hear me talk about Phoebe Bridgers Punisher. And my best friend doesn’t understand why I rewatch Call Me by Your Name all the time.
Those are things I love alone, from myself and for myself. Love shared with others creates communion but love practiced alone creates identity.
I think that’s part of why I keep coming back and because I keep doing it alone, I keep discovering new things. There is always another piece of myself waiting somewhere inside and sometimes I feel as though I have a thousand lives left to live before I can fully understand the density of both. How many times have I watched that movie, read that novel? I know entire passages by heart and every time I leave more amazed than before.
I feel devastatingly seen by the characters and even if I tried, I don't think I could explain half the reasons why. It is something that has been ingrained in me since I was a child, something fundamental.
I see myself in Ryan when Spencer and everyone else thinks it absurd that he would be so devastated after losing Brendon. In how he and Jon decided to create The Whiskeys because they simply could not let go of the songs they had made together. When during A Kingdom by the Sea he insists that he is still part of the music scene, that he still has a place in it even when he resents it. In Brendon naming himself Roscoe. In the look on Penny Lane's face during the "Tiny Dancer" scene when William tells her he needs to go home, and she says: You are home.
Mostly when Sapphire questions if anyone knows what it’s like to truly love some silly little piece of music, or some band, so much that it hurts.
I know. I understand it all everywhere; in happiness and grief, in books and in baking for my family. In friendship and in the loss of it. In saying goodbye. In having Fleetwood Mac on repeat. In the silence where I've had to let everything I feel travel through every vein in my body so it doesn't all pile up in my heart. I understand it in this yearning I have of belonging.
Belonging to something, to someone. To a feeling larger than life. Or even to myself or to that poem or to that song. More than anything, to that song.
“I know the world is a broken bone, but melt your headaches, call it home.”
It fills me with such sweet nostalgia & melancholy but I think of this sadness as a luxury. What oddities and blessings. The world is huge and beautiful and temporary and it’s all happening: all the tender and cruel things and God, I got so lucky it’s absurd.
The question was never how I love the way I do. The question was always why. And the answer is simple: it is all I have ever known how to do.
And as much as only you may truly understand, I do love this film and this book, so much so that it hurts.
Thank you for the music.
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