Back to the Old House
Cora BryantLike the generations before me, I sustained myself in my early adolescence on a diet of The Smiths and cheap menthol cigarettes. The combination was satiating, delicious, mature: an expression of as yet unfelt experience. I couldn’t understand why everyone thought The Smiths made sad music. People would try to tell me they were tuneless, lifeless, and joyless; to me, they were jubilant. When I was fourteen, I listened to Hatful of Hollow every day for a month. They were happy days – I consider them tenderly.
My consuming obsession with Mancunian music led me into the arms of my first boyfriend. We texted constantly about Morrissey and Johnny Marr, Joy Division, Oasis. About how we had been born at the wrong time. I thought he was effortlessly cool; his knowledge was limitless, his passion was infectious. We had sex for the first time listening to a Stone Roses vinyl. He stopped halfway through to flip it over to the B-side.
We met two or three times a week, carving out hours for each other from our sixteen-year-old lives. He’d walk me back to my house after school, down a road lined with blossoming trees; pinker and more attractive each day. It was springtime. Everything was new. The weather was getting warmer and the sky, bluer. I was unprecedentedly happy.
Growing older, we realised how little we had in common. After we split up, he made his own music and put it on the internet. I listened to it in secret and hated it. It was so dissimilar to what we had listened to together that it felt traitorous; his songs were chaotically overproduced, hiding none of the sweet melodies or understated riffs that we’d made love to. I tortured myself knowing that they weren’t for me – he’d moved on, here was the proof. I took to missing him, and spent a long summer yearning constantly to have everything back how it was. When the weather cooled, so did I. I realised that the end of our relationship didn’t mean the end of the world.
I was never reckless enough to marry the sound of Marr’s wailing guitar to the memory of my first real relationship. I saved The Smiths for myself. Regardless, I will always offer a second of remembrance to that sixteen-year-old girl in love when I position the needle of the turntable on the edge of my The Queen is Dead album, now dented with skips from years of use.