myth

As seen in Route 7 Review

Kyoto is beautiful in winter. I know because I’m nineteen and freckle-faced from a summer I’ve just escaped, and I’m lost somewhere between Kyoto Station and where I’m meant to meet my mates for dinner. And I’m listening to a song, this one song that has spent a half-life on repeat, threaded through my chorded earphones.

The first time I heard this song I was drunk and stupid and probably in love. In love with the world that I’d stumbled into, a world not of my own but borrowed from the new friends I had found myself surrounded by. Older friends, ones who lived out of home and out of routine. Ones that had aged out of high school by a couple of years and were closer to the horizon of adulthood. Close enough to see it, it seemed, but never reach it. I felt young and dumb and deliriously happy. I felt my world expanding, meeting new people and hearing new sounds and being naïve enough to think it was forever.

We were in a car southside. Streetlights seemed to be dancing on the powerlines because of the speed and because of the wine. I wasn’t wearing a seatbelt and my friend driving wasn’t sober. Maybe that should’ve scared me, but I still felt young and invincible and like I had a future beyond that moment. Nothing was ending for me there; there were only beginnings in that car racing down The Esplanade. The car lights and streetlights and beach lights of St Kilda grabbed me by the wrist, led me down the road of teenage nostalgia.

I was sitting in the backseat. My window was down, and with the breeze in my hair and summer up my nose, I felt the ecstasy of my coming of age. Summer let me slip her underneath my tongue and rub her raw into my gums. Tripping down Chapel Street, we were soundtracked by the heat. It was January, one of the last summers before these three months of the year were filled with grief instead of parties. For now, the heat meant hot evenings, it meant sweat between our skin and windows kept open as we slept. It didn’t mean bushfires and it didn’t mean death. Right then, the heat still reminded us of what it felt to feel alive.

I remember the heat like I remember what I was wearing. Denim shorts that only fit me in summer and sneakers I’d had since I was fourteen. I remember what it felt like, to be in those clothes and be in that car, to be in that time in my life when I dared to swallow the optimism summer kissed me with. And these things that I remember all belong categorised in my head as sensory chapters to a story dictated by the song playing through the car speakers. It’s the song that underlines every word of this narrative, grabs them in bold and pushes them into italics.

The place and space where I first heard this song defines the beginnings of its life within my own. I heard it in that car, and now I obsess over it in Japan; it’s the same body and the same brain, but everything else had changed. I listen to it as I walk around the neighbourhood of Kyoto I’ve found myself in, a neighbourhood of parks and pedestrian crossings and smiles that don’t speak my language. I’ve found myself here whilst trying to find myself here, but I’m still looking. Looking like I was looking out of that car in St Kilda, like I’m looking down these backstreets of Kyoto. I’m always looking because I am sure that I am lost.

I listen to this song everywhere, just to see what it feels like. Because when we listen to music, we don’t just remember the first time we heard it, or the one after that; every listen creates a subsequent memory. I hear the memories of every listen and every other listen in between.

I listen to this song as I’m lost somewhere in Kyoto. Around street corners and between locked bikes, I listen as a synth whispers in my ears that everything’s going to be okay. Okay in this moment, as my phone battery is low and I don’t recognise the street names, and okay in a broader, bigger sense, like one day I will grow up and be happy and remember Japan only by the photos and the sound of this synth. I’ve spent days walking around the outskirts of this city, getting to know the Kyoto trains and 7-Elevens. Every one of these steps I take is soundtracked by this song, a song I first heard only a week ago when it was still summer and I was still in Australia.

My friend once told me that marijuana can stay in the roots of your hair for weeks on end; I think January is doing the same. The music from the playlist that soundtracked my summer has dug its roots into my skull. One minute, I was racing down Chapel Street, sweat between both pits, and the next I’m wearing a ski jacket in the northern hemisphere. My body has moved across borders, across seasons, but my music hasn’t quite caught up.

Myth by Beach House is the song I play on constant rotation. With strawberry cream Pocky sticks in one pocket and my almost-dead phone in the other, I use the last of my battery to let Myth convince me I’m not lost. On the top of a steep hill, I look around for any evidence of a train station. But I’m somewhere far beyond the station, far beyond the boundaries where tourists are supposed to go. Powerlines web above me and concrete homes stand before me, and the blues and the greys and the off-whites of winter feel to me like the cold shoulder of someone whose language I haven’t bothered to learn. Now the guilt of being lucky enough to be overseas is overwhelmed by the excruciating desire to be back home. To be back in summer and be back with friends, to be a little less lost and a lot less lonely.

And so I turn up Myth. I listen to the way it shakes, it chimes; a keyboard creeps in, a guitar after that. I listen to the way the music whispers, with words yes, but with something more, with the feeling that there is something more than this moment. I listen like a deep breath out, a sigh of relief, like my fingers are twinkling their ends to the faraway tingles of the music. The voices fly, the air around them echoes. It sounds as if I’m moving fast through a dream, running down a road that only goes forward. I listen like I listened that first time, when it felt like good things would happen, were happening, and this song is all I needed to feel that.

And in this moment, as I’m high up with Kyoto, wrapped in the arms of momentary bliss and listening to Myth, things are okay. I forget about the lump in my throat and the hunger pains in my stomach, and I let my feet move forward. I let Mythsoundtrack this moment and make me feel a little less lost. As the chorus twinkles and the vocals soar, I turn around to find all the faded blues and greys and off-whites of Kyoto dissolving with the sunset. Yellows and oranges and the deepest Japanese reds brush through the buildings and silhouette the trees. And I forget about the summer and the friends I left behind, I forget about feeling lost and feeling lonely, feeling like a teenager in a world of adults; I forget about anything beyond this moment. Kyoto feels beautiful, it feels like things will be okay.

***

I have a tendency to behave with this kind of teen girl melodrama. I left my parents at the airport and travelled thousands of kilometres across the equator, but still I feel young enough to behave like an angsty teenager. I feel adolescent, juvenile. My coming of age feels like it is always doing just that: coming. It isn’t here yet, nor would it ever be.

The whole notion of coming of age to me has always felt like a movie. It’s when the kids are riding their rusty bikes down the street as the sun sets behind them, it’s the girl sitting at a lunch table by herself in a busy cafeteria. Every film that I have ever watched of children becoming something beyond their childhood has had me in it. They’re fragmented in my mind, these frames and scenes of lonely boys and girls with their short tempers and trivial problems, they’re all captured in my head like a mirror ball at the school disco no one invited me to.

And in every one of these films is the one song on the soundtrack that captures in essence everything that two hours of visuals can’t. It’s the one that makes you feel seen, feel heard, it makes you feel connected to your fellow peers of teen angst and terrible acne. It’s the one that makes you feel nostalgic, but nostalgic for the moment that you’re living in right now.

For me, that song is Myth. And as I listen to it here in Kyoto, the scene that comes to mind is of me in the backseat of my friend’s car, feeling a breeze on my face out the window as we flash through St Kilda. I turn to the others in the car- an old friend, a new one, and someone I want more from than just friendship- and I say, hey guys, watch this. And then I do that thing that teenagers do in movies we hate do, I hover my hand just outside the frame of the car window and move my palm like a wave, surfing the wind to the chorus of Myth.

And everyone laughs, I think someone even films it, because while we’re kids in our early twenties behaving like teenagers, we assume these roles without the sincerity that the teenagers do in movies. Teenagers in movies sincerely surf the wind with their hands out car windows; we just do it to make fun. And while we play these roles of the teens we no longer are, or maybe never have been, within this act of performing some stereotypical movie-suitable coming of age, I am living out my own.

Myth was soundtracking this moment, and because this coming of age of mine is one for the ages, Myth’s birth into my life on this night marked a rotation of eternity. With my hand out the window, watching it dance across St Kilda rooftops, I caught a brief sensation of elation from the noise that had, up until this point, been only muffled detail in the background. What’s this song? I ask from the back, but the wind catches my voice and pulls it back into the summer outside. I want to ask again, I want to ask and to be heard and be answered, but I’m drunk and young and afraid of being ousted as uncool. I pull my hand back inside the car, but I leave the window open. The wind pulls my hair around my face as I pull my phone from my back pocket. I open my notes app and furiously punch in enough of the few words that I made out in an attempt to find the song tomorrow.

A whole week passes before I found that notes page again. A whole week of something being on the tip of my tongue, a reason for entering a room that I’d forgotten once in there. There was something from that night in St Kilda that felt eternal, but summer took my memory the same way wine did, and I just couldn’t remember.

***

A week later I’m in Japan. I crossed seasons and countries and time zones; tank tops are now puffer jackets and Australian dollars now yen. We were in Tokyo, buying train tickets to move on. The next stop was Kyoto. I had spent the last of the yen I had in cash on a sushi keyring and Cup Noodles for lunch, so my mate paid for my ticket. I told him I’d get money out when we got to Kyoto and went to write down how much I owed him in my notes on my phone. In amongst bank account details and old password logins, the note at the top was the one I had entrusted with perpetuity. Capitals in all the wrong places and words that only just made sense, the tip of my tongue had finally been found. I tried to dissect enough out of this gibberish to let the internet find me what I needed.

Tokyo sang with the feeling of being someplace but home by ourselves for the first time. Kyoto sings Myth. The only time on this trip I turned my data roaming on was to download Myth by Beach House on the train that left Tokyo behind. I’ve found myself in a place below that mirror ball again, fragments of my coming of age collecting the light from all around me and reflecting it onto this foreign city I’ve found myself in. It’s our second day here and we parted ways after breakfast, and then I let myself get lost. The relief it feels to wander around a city that doesn’t know my face is compounded by the loneliness of a city that doesn’t want to. I don’t mind the loneliness in the context of Kyoto. It seems appropriate to lose myself in a city I’m lost in.

When Myth plays again, I’ll remember that I’m still lost here. In the backstreets of this city, on a train between stations, eating noodles by myself as the sun sets on the Kyoto skyline. When I hear Myth again, when I’m jogging around the park or driving my sister’s car home at midnight, nothing will have changed and I’m still be the same, almost twenty in a country I never learned the language of. When I hear Myth again, I’ll hear what it’s like to be wishing summer still had me underneath her tongue.