What's the most embarrassing thing you remember doing? What's that thing that was supposed to go to the grave with you? What's that moment that makes your stomach turn?
I have a couple of those, but maybe my most recent moments that has me nder my blanket at night is the one involving someone from my school. Remember the guy from The Lost wallet? Maybe it's time I tell you a bit about him.
I...do not really know anything about him. I just saw him a couple of times on the school stairs, thought he was cute and one time when I was feeling a bit overconfident decided to ask him out. That went...lets just say it was a disaster. He looked at me a bit weirdly, than turned me down in the most polite way possible before I fell apart in front of him and started spouting some bullshit about being depressed and then I ran away.
I hoped that he would forget about it or that he would think I was under the influence of something and just ignore it. We never spoke again.
Now, 2 years later, a lot has changed. But most importantly I was on social media. I followed some family friends, a couple of classmates and some elementary school friends.But after a while, I ran out of people I knew.
On a random Sunday tough, I was scrolling through Instagram and I ran across an account that had a photo that seemed like someone I knew. I opened it and to my surprise, it was a public account and all my expectations came true.
I spent about 15 minutes on his account, holding my fingers as far away from the like button in order to not do something dumb. I found out that he loved punk music. I saw all sorts of weir names. Operation ivy, Dead kennedys, Velvet underground...
This honestly was quite surprising to me, because he never dressed like a punk. He dressed pretty much the same as any other guy at school. His hair was not gelled together into a mohawk.
While scrolling through his page, an idea came to me. An idea that now, looking back at it, should stay an empty thought inside my head. I thought to myself.
˝What if I learn about punk music, make a fake Instagram account and start talking to him about punk music online?˝
Now, most of you with common sense would think to yourselves. And what then Lara? Are you gonna tell him who you are after leading him on? What are you gonna do?
But to my head, this were not relevant question. I went to the library close to my school, that had a pretty big CD collection and I started going through all albums that could have anything to do with punk. The Clash, Sonic youth, Foo fighters...
I also found a book called ˝Here are 2 chords now form a band˝ that took you through all the bands that mattered at all to punk.
Now making another account was the easy part. I made up a cringy name, choose a dumb profile picture and wrote the most bait poser bio of all time and I actually posted some videos of me playing guitar.
One day actually, I was sitting in the middle of my library studying the track list of the CD called: The Saints-I'm stranded, when a guy walked behind me.
˝That's some good stuff. It's punk, before people even knew punk existed.˝
I turned my head around to see him.
˝I'm Milan.˝ He said as he shook my hand.
He asked me if he could sit next to me and we proceeded to talk about music for about 30 minutes. By this point I knew enough to carry myself through the conversation. I could tell him which band were the real deal, which one were posers, but he stopped me.
˝I hate that word, poser, and no one uses it as much as posers themselves. You know which bands sell out the most, the ones that come from the working class, can I blame them, for what? For wanting to take care of their families, you want to do it for money, fine by me, I know I don't do it and that is enough for me.˝
He was generous enough to teach me some more of his knowledge and I even got to tell him I played guitar. We got to exchange numbers and parted my ways.
After about three weeks I felt like I was ready. I perfected my account and actually managed to garner about 120 followers. I searched for his account in the search bar and when I found it, I pressed the follow button.
Not even an hour later, I got back the message that i got followed back. I was jumoing through the roof and before I even got to send one DM I got the message.
˝Hey, what are some of your favorite bands?˝
I replied with Fugazi, Dr Feelgood and Descendents. He was quite impressed with that answer and we proceeded to chat for about ten minutes, we were only cut off because he said he had to go to a team practice.
I should have been happy, it was a success, but as I was laying in my bed that night I was thinking to myself. I thought about what Milan said about working class and posers from middle class. I knew I was the second one, the one that thought had a right calling others posers while being a poser myself. I knew that, but for the first time it started bothering me. I also thought about him, how I was lying to him it was tearing me apart.
When I woke up the next morning, still half asleep, I walked up to my phone, opened Instagram and deleted my account. Back then I didn't, but now I know it was the best decision I cold have made. And as I stood in front of my phone, it went off...
LARA PETEK 12.1.2024