Any first time high is one that’s worth cherishing, and I can say that I found one of the most sublime, unpredictable of such experiences on Saturday, July 18 while seeing the band Phish at the United Center. My friends Sasha and Matt flew in for all three days of the jam band’s Chicago run, which we’d not-so-jokingly referred to as PhishFork, in honor of the many years of Pitchfork Music Festivals that came to an end this year. And while the sadness of not being able to be in Union Park for the festival hovered in my thoughts all weekend – the fest has anchored my Chicago summers since 2015, outside of that long hot summer of protest in 2020 – there was something remarkable about instead finding myself inside the United Center on Saturday night, friendly molecules starting to percolate within, set into motion from almost as soon as the band came on stage.

Earlier in the day, the three of us met in the pouring rain in Bridgeport, making our way a few blocks from my apartment to the Museum of Post Punk and Industrial Music, a glorious little institution housed in a nondescript apartment on Lituanica Street. Spread over two floors is a remarkable treasure trove of ephemera collected over several decades – an original Nine Inch Nails demo tape, envelopes full of non-lubricated condoms that were affixed atop drum microphones so that museum creator Martin Atkins could pour water on his kit without destroying the audio equipment – creating a beautiful container for a freewheeling tour that spilled out over the course of several hours. And while Martin, who has been a member of many influential bands like NIN, Public Image Ltd., Ministry, and more, found it more than a bit silly that we’d be attending such a polar opposite show just a few hours later, the through line remained clear: music is a structure for creating meaning in our lives, stories that only coalesce when we put our bodies in communion with friends and strangers, and whatever strange vibrations begin pouring out from the stage in front of us, taking us to places we may have never imagined possible.

Phish isn’t for everybody. Before the show, I’d made little attempt to listen to the band’s music, whether their studio albums or the many thousands of hours of live performances, those mythic recordings that are the hallmark of the true jam band. Many times I’ve heard my dad describe the devoted fan culture of the Grateful Dead, the bootleg tapes that passed from hand to hand in the years before there was any chance of accessing these recordings in one place online, the love and devotion this required. And while it feels a bit too clean that I now have access to Phish’s set with a pin number and a few clicks on their official website, it’s still a blissful thing to know that some trace of the experience is available to me, drawing me deeper into this web that is still so fresh to the touch.

Throughout the show, I thought back on a specific Pitchfork Music Fest Saturday nine years prior, my second year at the fest. That night, Brian Wilson performed all of Pet Sounds, still something that feels impossible for me to have witnessed, a devastatingly beautiful experience even with clear evidence of his declining mental state. His set was immediately followed by Sufjan Stevens, one of my all-time favorites, all in dayglow balloons and telling the crowd he was ready to have a fun time together after a year and a half of touring Carrie and Lowell, mordant songs sung to his recently-departed mom. The half-tab of acid swirling through my body lowered what was normally a deafening roar of inner chatter down to blissful silence, and in its place were these musicians and the songs that brought me to life, Sufjan reminding me that “It's a long life, better pinch yourself.” All summer before the fest, I’d listened to the song “I Want To Be Well,” and in my overwhelming self-doubt, I’d often flipped the words around to something less hopeful, but more realistic: well, I want to be. I was still so far from where I hoped to find myself, yet Sufjan’s words were there all the same, a small comfort guiding me onwards. It’s how they sing it live, another recording available years later, a small time machine bringing me back to a moment in time that lives within me yet feels far-off and impossible to recall all the same.

Pitchfork 2016 cracked something open within me, crystalized a lot of hard work I’d done within myself to feel more embodied. I returned home from the fest that night, wore the dress that Elise gave me as we were ending our college relationship a few months before, and meditated on being alone, a blissful and frightening challenge I’d feared to face, but arrived anyways. That Sunday, as FKA Twigs closed the fest and I felt my body falling to pieces, I wrote in my journal: “By using myself so completely, I have uncovered new potentialities, new channels through which I will grow and create.” Nine years later, I could look back on that same weekend so many years before and hold that date as the start of some sense of real, embodied being, still a ways away from knowing I could transition and get even closer to the source of these things, yet still on a path that’s stayed beneath my feet for nearly a decade now.

Sasha was also in the crowd for Sufjan that night, one of many shows we shared without knowing it, connecting the dots only years later. On Pitchfork Saturday last year, after the two of us danced our asses off to Jessie Ware, Carly Rae Jepsen, and Jamie XX with Micco, we then biked back to Bridgeport, and ran into Sam and Eileen. (I wrote about that night, and the confluence of molly, poppers, and estrogen as powerful chemicals in my life, for the latest issue of Drug Music, available here.) I knew they’d all be at Mondegreen, Phish’s first full-scale festival in nearly a decade, just a few weeks later; yet I didn't expect that Sasha would be transformed by the experience, made into a devoted fan over the course of those four days. Collectively, the enthusiasm my friends all showed over the past few months for this strange, seemingly impenetrable musical journey drew me out to join them, however unprepared I may have been. Seeing the people you love overjoyed at something is among the greatest gifts I’ve ever found on this earth, and getting to be a part of that for a few hours, now primed for the possibility of future Phish moments together, is about all I could ever hope for. As lead singer for the group Trey Anastasio put it in a band profile after Mondegreen: “Ephemeral moments last forever.”

In these moments, I’ve been thinking a lot about Chloe Dzubilo, a brilliant trans elder whose art I recently wrote about for Defector. Visiting her archives last fall, I got to see a list of roles she played in her life, my favorite being number 11: “great connector and its a fav thing for me to do :)).” Reading those words on the page, I knew that Chloe and I were blessed with this same simple gift of being overjoyed to weave together more tightly the communities that we call home, alive in nothing more than the realization that you’ve helped your beloveds find one another, made into something bigger in the process. I knew for many years that making these connections felt intuitively right, a task that’s always felt most obvious at music fests, where you never know what strange accumulation of passing companions you might find. Yet to see it in Chloe’s handwriting, put to the page even as she grappled with the devastating physical toll of living with HIV for more than 20 years, helped me see how essential this work remains in my life, a calling that is no burden at all.

The much harder task, of course, is to know that no beautiful thing can last long. I felt divine and impermanent all Saturday night and into Sunday, all sadness obliterated for a few bright moments. Yet as soon as I said goodbye to Matt and Sasha on Monday morning, sending them off after meeting for coffee at the Art Institute, I knew I needed the sadness welling up to reorient my perception, necessary to reintegrate a joy that was too fragile to hold long. In meditation, I pulled the Three of Birds card from the Shining Tribe Tarot deck (Three of Swords in traditional Tarot), a card that encouraged me to accept the sadness as a gift as well, to trust in what it needed to say. Looking at the three swords and what they might symbolize, I pictured three different ways we find ourselves separated from others on this earth.

There are those we will never know due to ignorance, our own or theirs, held apart by the erroneous belief that our differences mean we cannot find some way to connect. There are others who, from the simple reality that our time-bound bodies cannot be present with everyone who might bring us to life, we will never know in the finitude of our time here. But hardest of all, I’ve come to learn, are those who help us find our way within this messiness, companions with whom we may share a path for a time, yet must inevitably depart again along the way. Learning to say goodbye in those crystalline moments where time itself has been dilated to its slowest possible crawl is still a challenge I’m learning to embrace each day, grateful for impermanence to remind me that some other profound encounter is elsewhere around the corner, waiting to be found.

I shed an ungodly number of tears in about twenty minutes, listening to Sufjan sing “Will Anybody Ever Love Me?”, a song made all the more gutting knowing it was written in the process of watching his partner, Evans Richardson, pass away. And while it felt all too absurd to leave this sobbing state and venture forth into the busy sociality of Dyke Nite (coming up again at Bernice's this Monday!), I knew this much to be true: I’d rather be present to the many connections this life has made possible around me, and have to do the hard work of saying goodbye over and over again, then to not be a part of them at all.