Punk. Love. And Identity Crisis.

Punk rock. Bikes. Vocal fries. And morally ambiguous men.

The man who wrote a song about me was also my salvation, my damnation.

I was in high school, listening to electronic music, painting my nails black, wearing neo pink crop tops and shorts, going for something both edgy and trendy. He was the opposite of me — he was born with straight hair but had a big afro. He wore the same school uniform every day, but he paired it with Dr. Martin boots and chains on his belt. He drank cheap beer and smoked red Marlboro. He was the frontman in a punk band. And he rode a retro bike — loud, big, and covered in stickers.

The gas tank leaked. He fixed it with a bandana.

He didn’t have a driver’s license. But the way he talked made everyone think he did.

One day, he just took off and kept riding south. He put his boots on an abandoned police car and took photos of birds and posted them on the internet.

Two weeks later, he was back, sitting next to me in the classroom.

Up until that point, my whole life was like a greenhouse plant: a tightly controlled environment where my friends’ parents knew my parents. When your whole world was like that, a person who just showed up in your life, refusing to play by all the rules, came as a genuine shock to me.

He was a mystery. The kind of person I didn’t know existed until he was standing right in front of me, saying things that I had never thought of. So I did what girls like me would do — I offered to tutor him for free so I could spend more time with him.

It happened just like the movies. First, we’d study while drinking cheap beer at the same time. Then, we’d mess around and do some exploring around the building.

But how I became the girl in his song — I had no idea.

I was the ultimate groupie in my own opinion.

He got into music, and he was the reason why I loved it. He took me to underground punk shows and threw me in the mosh pit. I was pushed around by strangers from every direction, but when I fell and lost my glasses, everyone in the pit stopped to help me. It was a kind of community that didn’t need words. They just welcomed you in. Strangers, who played different roles in the daylight. But at night, they only wore one hat, and they got to become who they wanted to be.

Everything I ever knew up until that point was challenged. My world collapsed.

Have you ever gone inside a skyscraper and tried to open every single door?

We did.

We found things that didn’t make sense. Corners that even those who have worked there for years wouldn’t know about. Everywhere we went, we left a piece of ourselves on the wall — in the shape of a drawing, a smiley face, a sad face, a ghost face.

I became his companion. The girl sitting on the back of his vintage bike.

He showed me his world. And for a while, I pretended this was my world too, even though none of this truly belonged to me.

I wasn’t a cool girl, like he said. I didn’t wear hot red lipsticks, black boots, or sexy shorts. I wasn’t the type of punk girlfriend that he envisioned. I was a traveler, a passenger. But he was with me.

When my cat died, I cried in the back of his bike while he took me somewhere.

When I ran out of money, he’d pay for all the bills.

He called the police to pick us up when we went camping in the mountains in the late fall, and the wolves started howling really close.

And we fucked in all sorts of places. Rooftops. Mountains. Side of the road. In a tent. Staircases. Elevators. Construction sites. Classrooms. Under a window in a dark alley.

We were drinking, but hardly ever drunk — until our story ended in almost the same way every single YA romance movie ended — he moved to another country, and I stayed in the city.

His family moved him abroad, knowing he wasn’t likely to graduate or have a future. And I...I was abandoned in his world, along with the rest of his things.

I had an identity crisis. I looked for my exit even before he left. In a world that never belonged to me, I tried to find a home, and I dragged my best friend with me.

He thought I fell out of love. He thought I broke up with him because I was a heartless bitch.

In the next decade, he had me blocked, then unblocked, then blocked again. We kept repeating the same cycle.

But the truth is, I never stopped feeling the same way as I first saw him. We met again a few years after we broke up. He asked me out on an adventure with some of his friends, and I still felt the same, in awe, shocked, and curious.

That time, I followed him all the way across the sea. In a city, a bus trip away from his.

I had a script before I met him. He tore it to shreds and handed me his. He took it when he left, and mine no longer made sense.

Everything I loved, I loved because of him.

So, there I was, standing in a smoky bar at the center of the city’s underground music scene, occupied mostly by men in their 20s and 30s. Some were in their 40s. Some had been there since the 80s. They played all sorts of roles — indie label owners, artists, bands, venue owners... And I was the 17-year-old girl who had no idea what she was doing.

It was then that he wrote a song about me. In the lyrics, he compared me to a fly that kept buzzing in his face. He was annoyed by that fly, haunted by the memories, and nostalgic about the city. And he said I was rotting, and I kept rotting after he was gone.

He never published the song, but he sent it to me.