Fuck, what a night. What a day. I already know I am going to be spiralling about this for the next few days. I am definitely not fucking sleeping tonight. Something in me got switched on in that room, and now I can feel it pushing against the boundaries of my mind, demanding to be expressed. I do not quite know what it is yet. Maybe I just need to fucking explode it onto this page. Because fuck, man. The kids. They all have ADHD. They all have the tism. And somehow they showed me something about being alive that I had forgotten.
All that the kids want is safety, so they throw themselves into the sonic vibrations between drums and guitars, punk chords ricocheting through the room, grunge dragging its nails across the walls, heavy metal spitting in their faces and death metal pissing on their graves. Sweat, jeans with more rips than denim, black and white faces, shoes laced so high they could be ladders to heaven, mouths wide open against the void of existence. They constantly fuck each other up, collapse, bleed a little, get pulled upright, and go straight back in. It is brutally physical and so fucking alive. I caught glimpses of their eyes and expected to witness pure fucking fear. Instead, there was a deep, almost divine serenity. Fuck, maybe peace is not the absence of noise. Maybe peace is finally being somewhere that sounds like you.
Somewhere the world outside can fuck off for three or so minutes, and the noise inside your head finally becomes the noise of the world. No future. No purpose. No explanation. Just guitar strings resonating through the darkened room, bodies that act almost like weapons of destruction, breath, sweat, impact, and the ephemerally furious fucking miracle of being young enough to remember that this moment is all that truly fucking exists.
Then the underage curfew came and the kids were pushed out into the night. I watched them pour onto the street, red-faced, sweaty, buzzing, electric, still fucking vibrating from the last song. Spiralling for a second about what I had just witnessed. I felt like I had just saw a rehearsal for the rest of their lives. They had spent the night learning how to live inside noise without being swallowed by it.
And then I looked back through the doors.
The adults were in there. At first, I thought I was looking at the same crowd. The same ripped jeans. The same battered shoes. The same sweat-darkened clothes. The same black and white faces, except the Minecraft shirts had somehow become band shirts, the cartoon characters replaced by faded logos and names of bands they had apparently loved long enough to turn into part of their skin. The clothes had changed, but barely. The bodies had changed more. Older shoulders. Heavier faces. Greyer hair. A little more damage showing through. But they were still fucking moving. Still smashing into one another. Still throwing their heads back. Still bleeding a little. Still getting hauled upright. Still wearing those same stupid, ecstatic smiles.
And that was the part that fucking got me.
The noise does not disappear. We just get older and better at pretending we cannot hear it. We learn when to swallow it, when to smile over it, when to sit silently at a dinner table while something inside us is kicking the fucking walls. We learn how to carry ourselves like adults while some younger version of us is still screaming somewhere underneath. Then, every so often, we find a room where we can let it out. Where the guitars are loud enough, the bodies are close enough, the floor is shaking hard enough that the outside world finally matches what has been rattling around inside us.
Fuck, we are all just kids at the end of the day, aren't we? Older bodies, identical hunger. Different lives, the same noise. Maybe adulthood is just a body getting older around the same frightened, hungry thing that has always been inside it. We learn names for everything. Responsibilities. Careers. Bills. Loss. Love. We learn how to make ourselves look like we know what the fuck we are doing. But underneath it all, there is still that kid looking for somewhere to belong, somewhere loud enough to drown out the fear for a minute, somewhere another human being can crash into you and pull you back up. Maybe that is why those rooms matter. Not because they save us, but because for a few minutes they let us stop pretending we need saving. Maybe the noise is not something we outgrow. Maybe it is the oldest part of us, waiting for a room loud enough to hear it. I walked out with something burning behind my eyes. The noise and this realization has awakened a fire in my heart: a reminder that being alive is not always about finding peace, but finding somewhere your chaos is allowed to breathe.