Fantasizing the Sight of Manhattan

By Jared Brunner

“I’m still cold,” Leelah muttered bitterly, watching the snow fall out of the window of the 3 o’clock train back from the city. “Cold and disappointed.”

I couldn’t blame her: we were on our way back from one of the biggest let-downs in our many years of concert-going together, not only because our excitement had been so high, but because everything possible seemed to have gone wrong.

I had bought the tickets months before in anticipation of this day—our first metal show together, Deafheaven, whose music had enough equal element brutality and sweetness that it served as the perfect entryway for us into the metal scene. I had been a fan for a few years by then, but the one day I had put “Dream House” on in my car to show her what all the fuss was about, she seemed to all at once fall in love with the band. Little did I know how much she would play that same song over and over again in the months to come, in times of anxiety and those of ecstasy. We had days when we would be home studying together and I’d watch her suddenly stand up from her papers, wander across the room, slide my Sunbather record out of its crate, and ask me to play it while we studied, though I think we’d inevitably get distracted by it. In effect, this concert had become somewhat of a beacon in the future which could get us through the tougher times of the school year.

But the closer the concert came, the more we should’ve known it was doomed. A week before, we got a troubling notification: the forecast called for an unexpected mid-March blizzard to practically freeze us off the map for the whole week. Our entire plan, months in the making, had been thrown into uncertainty. But how could we miss this show of all shows over some weather? We figured it would pass, and decided to brave it. It was worth it for the music.

By the time the train had dropped us off in Brooklyn, however, the temperature had dropped and the snow was starting to fall. And when I say low temperature, I don’t mean it was just a chilly day outside—that was certainly what we were expecting, but boy did we miss the mark.

The plan had been to pick up some food on the way there, but when we left the store, we found the sun had gone down and we had nowhere to eat in the snow. Settling on some benches in the park, we endeavored to finally consume the bounty we had purchased, warm chicken tenders and French fries to match. Only thing is, in the walk looking for a place to sit, they had practically been re-frozen! At the very least, they were bitter to the taste, and I started to feel my hands go completely numb as I tried to eat them. This was a bad sign, we still had an hour to the concert and I was feeling pins and needles all over. I figured we were just a few minutes from cannibalizing each other in the storm, so we decided we’d try to see if the venue was open early.

To make matters worse, when we actually got into the concert, we were rewarded with long delays and a slew of opening acts with which we were unfamiliar. In all honesty, we were hardly paying attention to these issues in our excitement, but we weren’t checking the time either. The night was getting later, and much colder.

Then, Deafheaven took the stage. Just then, in that first warbling scream of guitar and rumbling roar of drums, everything, the potential frostbite and all, had been redeemed. We threw ourselves into the pit and, with the reverberations of the bass crawling up our skin, we absorbed all the pure power and beauty that the song had to offer.

And then it ended.

I checked my phone: it was almost two o’clock in the morning. The last train of the night was leaving in thirty minutes, and we had a twenty minute walk. One beautiful song into this concert that was shaping up to be everything we had dreamed of, it was time to leave.

So there we were, bundled up on a quiet last train home from Manhattan in the middle of the night, watching the rest of that concert blink out in the distance in somber disappointment. I made another plan that night—the next time Deafheaven came to town, I’d scoop up those tickets as soon as possible, and work out every last detail to perfection—next time, we’d have the perfect night we had planned for.

And now, with each of us in college with posters signed by the band hanging up in our rooms, I can say we did.