On Mk.gee and Drinking Alone in Depressing Neighbourhood Bars

I often find myself in bars alone, and it’s only after I’ve ordered something that I realize I didn’t plan my day to unfold like this. This occurs during moments of acute mental turmoil, heartbreak, or nostalgic reflection, sometimes all at once. It’s not a choice I make consciously, but a force of nature guiding my feet toward the closest bar, a manifestation of solitude that is not poetic, but one soaked in a lack of strength to stand still. I've always felt safer crying in public than in the presence of people I loved, so I embrace these beer fizzed afternoons as important moments of catharsis, giving myself the gift of valuable reflection and clarity. However, there are times when it feels like offering myself a bouquet of sharpened knives.

Living in a small city and frequenting the same two bars, you can't escape familiar faces even when you want to; strangers start feeling like friends. Take, for instance, the guy I saw three times over three months, once each month. Funnily, each time I saw him, I was at my lowest, anxiously scribbling in my notebook with tears in my eyes. The two times he was there, he was alone, sketching trees in his worn sketchbook. I couldn't tell if he was any good but I assumed so. As he drew, I kept writing some exaggerated thoughts in my notebook. It was a symbiotic exchange. We looked at each other occasionally, never more than a second, showing each other that perhaps our loneliness wasn’t so singular after all.

When he got up to pay the bill, I felt a pang of abandonment. When you feel profoundly alone, each possibility of compassion, no matter where it comes from, even if it’s a glance that lasts a second becomes a lifeline. My headphones served as a shield against the world, yet if I'm the only one alone in a bar, visibly upset, doesn't that paint an even more desolate picture? It does make you feel like a court jester, your presence being important merely to serve as a backdrop, as the person who listens to music and writes stuff in a journal. One of those millions of other things that look romantic from a distance but feel hollow when you're the one doing it. It always surprised me to observe how betrayed I felt whenever the people around me who read books, drew, or wrote were just doing those things to pass the time until the person they were waiting for showed up.

On those days, the music I listen to comes from a serious decision-making process. Knowing that if I associate an album I deeply love with a burdening moment, I can forever ruin it, not allowing the album to grow and blossom within happier memories, forever associating it with depression. These last couple of months, my hand immediately went for Mk.gee's album 'Two Star & The Dream Police.' I craved the album when I was sad, to say the least. I must have heard it over eighty times, front to back.

When you release an album, it belongs to the world and people like me who drink alone in bars. I can project whatever meaning I want to it, turn a song that is about death into something about me.

Mk.gee, in his album, talks about two main love interests: Candy, who embodies novelty, passion, fire, and burning, and Rylee, who embodies yearning. Maybe it's about himself and his two polar opposites, two people he doesn’t like. Maybe I’m missing the 'plot' entirely, and he would tell me to fuck off if I ever shared my interpretation with him. Whatever it might be about, the latter interpretation resonated with me. I listened to the album religiously, thinking that I’m Rylee and Candy simultaneously. I imagined Candy as the woman I want to be and Rylee as the woman I currently am, who can’t break the spell just yet. It almost put me in a state of psychosis. Never underestimate how obsessed a person can get when they have a couple of recurring problems they don’t have the answers for. The state of depression and loneliness turns albums into religious wells, into which you throw coins and make wishes upon.

I felt better for a while and stopped reaching for the album altogether. This week, I find myself listening to it as religiously as I did before. 'The way you care about music and the people who make it is so inspiring. You would still go to a concert of a band you loved if you had a breakup the day before,' a friend once told me. It was only then that I realized it wasn’t something many people could say about themselves.

Not many people feel as deeply as I do, I know. Lorde’s song 'Liability' holds so much power over me for that very reason. I do feel like a forest fire too. I do go home and dance with someone, yet if you were to peek into my window, you’d see a girl dancing alone, holding herself. Not many people cry when they see a good live performance or go into a state of psychosis over two fictional characters in an album.

I'm currently going through a big transition in my life. To remember it by, I made a mix called 'Parting Gift' that started with Mk.gee's 'Dream Police,' the last song on his album. It's interesting that I chose a song he saw fit to conclude something as the song that represented a new beginning for me. I sent the mix to NTS Radio. 'If they pick it up, my decisions as of now will be valid,' I told myself. It was picked up. It was, in a way, a reminder to take what's in front of me, even if it looks different from what I had in mind. The dirt, the rot, the silence, the beauty, and the grass stains—all of it is mine.

I'm no better than you; I have parasocial ideations about the people who craft the soundtracks to my life, too. I want to thank Mk.gee and the guy with the worn-out sketchbook for being important characters in my life as I close this cycle, even if there is no way they will ever know how much it meant to me.