I’m buying tickets for a gig, clicking through the various screens like I used to do, in the before times.
It feels surreal, the imagining of a crowded room, the floor sticky with spilled beer, and the smell of sweat and perfume.
This past year I have learned not to expect anything, yet I am still expectant for a return to something in the future.
My life, I realise, can be charted through tickets in one way or another.
Moments shared with the people I love frozen in time, investments in memory, speculative, the pay-off sometimes so rewarding.
Dancing relentlessly to Steve Earle after too many beers at the Town & Country Club, long since gone, like the days themselves.
Taking my children to see Prince at the Hop Farm a few miles from my door, telling their unimpressed faces that this would be a day they’d remember, and watching my words bounce off them.
But most significant of all perhaps are the tickets that were left unused.
In the worst of my years, I would buy tickets to shows I would never attend.
At first, it was a surprise to me. I couldn’t understand the force field that had been absent right up until the last minute which would then slam down and stop me in my tracks.
“Perhaps you just wanted the thought of something to look forward to,” my daughter suggests as we’re discussing the importance of tickets.
“Or maybe you just realised you didn’t really want to go,” she adds.
“Maybe,” I say, knowing that neither is right.
It was, I think, just a peculiar manifestation of anxiety borne from depression but, at that time, I was not brave enough to take it with me on a train or in a car.
Over time my strange behaviour with tickets morphed into something that felt darker, self-destructive.
I’d buy tickets for shows already knowing that I wouldn’t be going.
I would write the date in my diary, months ahead, and wonder in that very moment what elaborate excuse I might use when it came to it.
Eventually, I gave up trying to find excuses.
Tickets became an illustration of emotional trauma when they were not a reminder of it.
I had tickets to see Jane Siberry in London the day my mother called and said, “Graham, I think Dad has died.”
The tickets to see Stereophonics in Brighton were in my pocket as we ate dinner before the show with friends when the hospital called.
“Is that Graham?”
“Yes.”
“Graham, it’s Maidstone hospital. I’m afraid your mum took a turn for the worse earlier this evening.”
“What do you mean? Has she died?”
Suddenly everything slowed down and became much smaller, but bigger at the same time.
Soon after that, I arrived at Gatwick airport for a business flight to Madrid a full twenty-four hours after the flight for which I had a ticket.
“Do you keep tickets after the event?” I ask everyone at dinner.
“I do if I remember,” my son says.
“I pin them all on my noticeboard,” says my daughter.
“I also have every train ticket from my first year at Uni. Sometimes the guard just scribbled on them, and sometimes he stamped them with a little heart shape,” she adds with some glee.
“But what about tickets for shows you never went to?” I ask.
Everyone looks at me with narrowing eyes.
“Why would you do that?” my son asks.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I say, “as a reminder?”
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