By Jenna Remley
On a Friday afternoon in February, my boyfriend of just over a year came to my apartment and told me that he thought it was best if we broke up.
This came as quite the shock to me. Up until that moment, I’d felt confident that we had a future together. After an incredulous and teary conversation, he told me he was going to leave, and then we should talk again in a few days.
On Saturday night, I had a ticket to a Wombats concert.
I spent the weekend feeling alternately numb, miserable, and physically ill. My heart would pound erratically and chills wracked my body. I had little appetite and anything I did manage to eat tasted like paste. My mind went around in circles, trying to articulate my chaotic thoughts and feelings. I put together all my arguments for why we shouldn’t break up. I knew that it was unlikely that he would change his mind, and I told myself that I couldn’t have any hope of our relationship continuing; if I did, it would kill me when that hope was crushed. I was still going to lay my cards on the table, though - explain why I thought we shouldn’t give up on the love we’d fostered for the past year.
Despite feeling so dreadful, I still figured I should go to the concert. I was trepidatious because music had felt like a minefield for the previous 36 hours. Normally I’d play music in the background while I did chores or ran errands, but now I was afraid to hit “shuffle” on a playlist - what if a song came on that reminded me of him? Really any song about love or heartbreak might trigger a meltdown.
To add insult to injury, when I’d opened Spotify that morning and looked through my library, I saw that a playlist he’d made for me as a romantic gesture early in our relationship had been deleted (or made private, maybe; either way it was no longer accessible to me), and a wave of dread washed over me. That seemed like a pretty dire sign that there was no coming back from this.
I had already paid for the concert ticket, though. I wasn’t going to stay home, no matter how wretched I felt.
I’d never seen The Wombats perform, but I’d been listening to their music for probably close to a decade. They’re a three-man outfit formed in Northern England, an indie rock band with extremely catchy songs and lyrics that excel at conjuring lurid and emotionally charged images. Their music invokes an aura - of sweat and bruises, day-old makeup and late-night mistakes, self-loathing and missed opportunities.
I was incredibly emotionally raw as I entered the standing-only venue and melted into the crowd. When the opening band came out and yelled, “y’all feeling alive tonight?” my eyes started to tear up without any specific cause. The opener did a 30-minute set, and then I stood around waiting for the main act. I hoped the transition would be quick; I tried guessing how long the show would last, thinking about what time I could be home and in bed. I essentially wanted to get it over with - to fast forward through the night, until whenever I could speak again with my (ex?)boyfriend and know if things were really definitively over, or if I could convince him to try working something out.
Finally, The Wombats burst onto the stage with “Moving to New York,” all energy and flashing lights, and I found myself singing along and nodding to the beat. The music they performed didn’t end up bothering me, even the love songs - the type of relationships The Wombats write about are typically turbulent, hot and cold, full of drama. They in no way resembled my relationship, which I had felt comforted and steady in until the day before when it all came crashing down.
The Wombats put on a good show, because they were willing to play around with things, to improvise and experiment in ways that can only be experienced live. The frontman did a solo, acoustic performance of “Lethal Combination”; he introduced another song with “we’re going to play a terrible lounge-style version of this song, so feel free not to enjoy it.” At one point, someone in a wombat costume joined the band on stage to play a trombone and pass out signs to the audience that read “I <3 The Wombles.” (That’s not a typo; it’s the joke.)
I became more engaged as the show went on, buoyed by every familiar song. It was extremely cathartic to join the crowd in shouting the refrain “this is no Bridget Jones!” over and over during “Kill the Director.” There came a moment where I was dancing with abandon and singing along shamelessly, and my body was so full of joy that there was no room for sadness, no trace of the pain I’d been completely overcome with for the past two days. As I screamed and applauded between songs, I knew that no matter what happened, I would get through this. I would find joy, both during and after mourning this relationship.
Their final song of the night was “Let’s Dance to Joy Division,” the chorus of which goes:
Let’s dance to Joy Division and celebrate the irony
Everything is going wrong, but we’re so happy
Let’s dance to Joy Division and raise our glass to the ceiling
‘Cause this could all go so wrong but we’re so happy
Never in my life, I think, has an encore more perfectly resonated with me. I hummed the song to myself as I walked through the dark, cold streets back to my car. I would be okay. This would hurt. But I was still going to be happy, someday, somehow, even as things all went wrong around me.
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