(miss)ives from tumblr, pop music lyrics and artists of yore
The first issue of season 3 is an ostensibly casual letter to someone the author decided to leave in the past except for her favourite things about them
Greetings dear dreamers
Welcome to the third season of The Abandoned Dreams Collective. Its been a while and as my writers and friends know, I’ve had a number of life changes since we last met. Deciding to move countries, trying to move countries, making all the arduous career extrapolations that will allow you to move countries, doing all the exhausting boring life admin things to actually move countries, building a life in a new place, meeting new people, entering a new decade (or a new era, if you please), learning what you want to be known for and deciding how you want to live your hours and your weeks, figuring out what energies you want to carry forward and what is it that’s been weighing you down, mustering up the courage and life force to make those changes and sometimes just sitting still contemplating whether you should and what the ramifications of that would be.
Even when you enter a new stage in your life, you do carry pieces, baggage even from all the past ones and you can’t always shake it off easy. People who you know hurt you on purpose, didn’t treat you the way you’d like, didn’t appreciate all you put in, didn’t give as much as you did to it, quite evidently didn’t care as much. But then you have history. They still know you in a completely unique way from anyone else. You have your shared language, your jokes, the niche interests that you can speak about only with them. Can you pick and choose what you carry forward? Can you be as callous and cruel but giftwrap it in the best intentions and therapyspeak? Will Schroedinger’s cake live if you eat it too? This email I sent months ago was my attempt to try.
(miss)ives from tumblr, pop music lyrics and artists of yore
so…….hi
some days ago I was going through my junk inbox to see the newest ways Nigerian princes were trying to spam unsuspecting fools, remind myself of things I'd subscribed to in the hopes of winning a staycation or a skincare set that would single handedly change my life (and reported as spam when I didn't), and make sure nothing important had missed my main. That's when I saw it. One email after another from Tumblr giving me a chance to click a button if I wanted to keep the domain name of the inactive blogs before they took over them to offer up as options to the people making tumblrs today (is anyone making new tumblrs today?). A separate email for each one. I'd made so many in those days. Scintillatingagony for all the beautiful things and moments I ached for. Doushenkaasword for all those times I wanted to express myself through art of my own. Movethatsexyradhabody for making memes based on a movie that i believe remains underrated to this day. ThingsToTellForum for that time my cousin was off her whatsapp for exams but I still wanted to tell her everything. Btisland for you and me and the things we shared and the worlds we created inside our heads. I'm a collector of words and photos so I wanted to keep it all. It felt like a time capsule to another era when so much was bright and captivating and untarnished (until of course, you went and tarnished it. But we won’t talk about that now because that’s over). But on that August day I didn't remember my password to the old accounts. It was a busy day so I let it be. It's been some days now that I've been wondering if you got that email too and if you saved it.
This morning I wasn't feeling my usual walk playlist of "liked songs" (repetitive) so I opened up Spotify’s Discover Weekly after a long time. The first song that came up was Who Says by Selena Gomez that- it turns out, I didn't have to discover because there was a period when I'd listen to it incessantly in a time before Spotify knew what I was listening to. It was a time when I'd write song lyrics that hit me particularly hard as Facebook lyrics and on walls wanting someone else to also feel the way it just switched something on in my brain. So I wrote the lines ‘who says you're not perfect who says youre not beautiful who says you're the only one that's heard it’ on yours and waited for a response. The response when it came was bemused and comical and absolutely not what I was expecting. "Nobody says!!??" you proclaimed. There's probably a deeper meaning there somewhere about why that stayed with me but that's not relevant to wonder about right now. I took the song and the fact that the memory exists as a sign to write this
I read the previous emails you wrote.
I read them again.
And again.
I appreciated the words and the sentiment deeply and thought about them at length. But I didn't reply.
I didn't know what to say.
I didn't know if I had anything to say at that moment so I left it and then it became too late - or it felt too late.
One of my favourite lyrics in a song I heard recently is "are you really going to talk about timing in times like this" and I feel like maybe it's not too late because what is time even but a social construct?
Now I think I have some words but they're all over the place and the tenses and perspectives are a mess because I think in first person and second person and third person all at once. Sometimes I use the latter two to distance myself a little, give me a shield of sorts even as I reveal too much of myself. I know you’ll understand anyway.
Tee is still the pet name I've liked the most and identified with the most out of all the ones I've had unceremoniously thrusted on me. I wish that every time I’m asked if I have a pet name, I didn’t think about all that happened and didn’t feel conflicting feelings about potentially proposing the one you gave me.
I have such a complicated relationship with friendship now and sometimes I think its because you’ve ruined me for it. You go through life and you make friends and some are ok and some are great and some are amazing and sometimes you find someone with whom your brain just clicks so then after they hurt you in a way that you never thought a friend could and that ends, you spend the rest of your time in this world trying to find someone else who gives you the same thing. But you can't because there is just one ‘that person’ and sometimes its okay that no one else could get your brain and communicate in that same amalgamation of whimsical, candid and elemental. You're just going to punish others for no fault of their own, for not being that person, for not bringing you the magic that that one person did and you miss the unique magic that they bring.
I'm pretty sure we can't go back. There's too much water under the bridge (ever think about how people use "there's too much water under the bridge" and "it's all just water under the bridge" to mean opposite things?). There’s a part of me that’s always going to want to win against you, want to do better than you, want the world to see that I am better than you and that I deserve the good things before you and more than you. Sometimes I wish I didn’t feel this way but then I think about the way you casually pushed me aside all those years ago and lose the guilt. Feeling the way I feel, I know we can’t have a healthy friendship again.
I was listening to a podcast where at one point they were talking about how they feel about Jake Gyllenhaal (this was before the 10 minute version came out when we found out that he was an asshole forrealz) after all they knew of him based on his relationship with Taylor from the song All Too Well and the point that stayed with me was "the song was that devastating because it must have been that big and important and meaningful and world changing to begin with and that's why it hurt so much when it went south and that's what makes the song so great"
There are traces of that in you and me, don’t you think?
So what now?
I've been thinking about great artists and writers of yore who corresponded with each other in a way that was bewitching enough to now turn into books which people pore over and study. I think we - our personalities, our skills, our relationship, our history, could find ourselves particularly suited to this premise.
Here's what I'm proposing. We write to each other. The abstract thoughts. The world explaining ideas. The musings that are too small and too big at the same time.
Not constantly. Not regularly. Periodically. Not the life events that will tell us who is winning. The things that would catapult us into the stratosphere of either great thinkers or fools. Not expecting an immediate reply. Just an understanding that it'll come at some point.
What do you think?
-Nirmitee Mehta
Abandoned on the interwebs
Abandoned on the interwebs is a new section on this newsletter where I recommend some riveting, spine tingling, evocative articles, books, essays that I’ve stumbled across when I’m left to my own devices on the internet.
What I Saw at Taylor Swift’s Delirious Eras Tour: It wouldn’t be me if I didn’t make everything about Taylor Swift. But really if you haven’t read this piece, you’re missing out. In the song Dear Reader she sings Dear reader, burn all the files//Desert all your past lives//And if you don't recognize yourself//That means you did it right, a manifesto if there ever was one for this season’s theme. But as the writer of this piece notes, what she did on the tour was much the opposite: she celebrated every version of herself through every stage, even those that the world considered cringe.
Yellowface by RF Kuang: I know, I know. You probably saw this book all over your book club feeds. I too discussed it in my own book club (Yes! one of the things I did after moving to my new homebase was join a book club). Read this for the way she describes a toxic female friend dynamic and relevant to my piece, how success affects it.
Before I leave you to dream
With the aim to continue growing this newsletter, I’ve set up a page where you can contribute monetarily: Ko-fi.com/theabandoneddreamscollective
This will support the newsletter grow through increasing reach, growing its pipeline of contributors, optimize submission management and eventually pay contributors.
I hope you consider contributing to this mission.
Thank you for reading this. Moving forward I will be posting with longer breaks between each piece so as to be able to breathe in between and give every piece the time and energy it deserves. I look forward to being back in your inbox when I’m ready with the next piece.
Much love and many dreams
Nirmitee
The Abandoned Dreams Collective
Really enjoyed the article, have had my fair share of friendship mishaps :3 so it was particularly relatable!!