I’m pretty much angry every day and it’s pretty much always for the same reason: My Chemical Romance. I first listened to MCR when I was 11 or 12. I heard a song called Cancer while creating a playlist on a website called 8tracks. My friend told me to put the song on the playlist so I did. It was a playlist inspired by The Fault in Our Stars by John Green. The song was a sad one and I didn’t really look into them much further because I already heard a few other songs (in passing, you could say), and didn’t like them too much.
One song I know I heard when I was younger, but didn’t like, was Teenagers, a song I relate to now ore than when I was 11. I guess I’m angry at them because they broke up, but I guess I really can’t be mad at that because it really was for the best and it actually opened some doors for me later on. But I could be angry because I wasn’t old enough to like them sooner or really understand their message until after they were gone.
I had been listening to Fall Out Boy since March 2013, the same time MCR broke up, but they didn’t make me pick up the emo style because they really changed their image and sound after they came back from hiatus and I wasn’t familiar with their earlier stuff when I first started out. MCR was lways a much different concept than Fall Out Boy. I met Ali in seventh grade and I had no idea that a few years later we’d be where we are today (or the reason for being there).
We became fast friends but at the time we were very different from each other. She was really into anime and didn’t like any music at all and while I did like Fall Out Boy, I had the attitude of a middle aged man that thinks all music today is trash and that classic rock is the only way to go. For a while I only wanted to listen to music made from the 60’s to the 90’s. I talked so much about bands and band members that Ali snapped at me once for alking about them so much. I have come to realize that Nirvana weren’t even that good.
Back then, I was also huge into Dave Grohl (formerly the drummer of Nirvana) and the Foo Fighters and my dad even tried to get me tickets to see them but it didn’t happen because they were sold out. I loved the Foo Fighters in seventh and a lot of 8th grade. But like all of my past obsessions, the Foo Fighters stopped really being my thing. It happened when they released Sonic Highways in November of 2014 and I think I liked probably 2 songs on the whole album. I tried holding on to them as long as I could but by December I tarted to look for new music. I wasn’t seriously listening to My Chem at that time, just casually.
I think I became a hardcore fan a little later, maybe in late January, when I told a friend who was feeling crummy, “Don’t be upset, listen to My Chemical Romance like all the emo people,” and, even though I had been completely joking, that person listened to me and told me I should listen to MCR, too. So did. For a while their music just depressed me because their music was so dark, but as time went on I started to look to them more and more and they became the band that made me happy. They may have dark, ad, music but Gerard Way has a voice that makes you feel things.
I’ve never met a MCR fan that didn’t feel something while listening to them and that’s something very powerful. Of course, I wasn’t a fan at the time of the breakup (neither was Ali), but I was on social media. It seemed like everyone I followed on social media (that I didn’t know in real life) had some experience with MCR. Everyone was so upset, even the people who weren’t fans. That was what made me sad. I knew how much they meant to a lot of the people I had encountered online, or just people I had seen talking on forums back when I started my ays on the internet.
I didn’t understand exactly what people were feeling, and I felt like I was looking into the house of my future family through a window while they mourned the death of a loved one. I felt something, but I didn’t understand what I felt. I didn’t know much about them but the power of their message reached me on that day because so many other people had felt it too. Right before the summer of 2015, Ali and I parted ways because of an overreaction on my part. I didn’t talk to her for the rest of the school year, and I moved to a different lunch table. My friend, Brock, always tells me “Gigi, just dmit it.
You aren’t even emo, you just say you are,” and I don’t know what Brock’s definition of emo is but I listen to MCR, wear smudged eyeliner, and skinny jeans so tight my mom tells me they look painted on. That’s emo enough to me. In June sometime, I was at my friend, Amanda’s house. She lives in the cul-de-sac next to mine and I walked behind my fence, my next door neighbor’s fence and then came up the side of her house to get to her front door. We were doing batting practice in her backyard and she texted our coach to come over because we didn’t have practice that night. So both my coaches came over long with two other girls.
After batting practice, my coach Meredith said she needed a new pair of Crocs™ and said we could all go with. We literally piled into the backseat of Meredith’s car. “There’s only three seatbelts so either one of you can’t go or we’re going to have to fit you all back there,” Meredith told us. She knew we all wanted to go with so she continued, “Two of you will have to share a seatbelt. ” “Why can’t Amanda just sit in the trunk? ” | asked, poking fun at my pal. “I would if you guys weren’t all 14 because that could get me in a lot of trouble, probably. Especially if anything happens, I don’t want anyone to get hurt.
It’s better to have two to a seat belt than one without,” Meredith told us. “Maddy and Amber, you guys are going to have to sit in the middle because you’re both tiny and Gigi and Amanda are the size of normal human beings. ” So I sat on the right side of the back seat, with Maddy next to me, Amber next to her and Amanda next to Amber. Amanda and Amber shared a seat belt as we drove to the Eagan outlet mall. “Wow there’s a Hot Topic right next to the CrocsT™M store,” I said to my coach, Rachel. “I’ll go in there with you, kiddo,” Rachel said to me. So we went into Hot Topic and that was the day I bought my first piece of emo merchandise.
I bought a My Chemical Romance shirt. And that was it. I was an emo from then on out. I wore the shirt every day for the whole entire summer. The design has almost completely rubbed off. Right before summer ended, I guess I texted Ali or she texted me, and I guess we became friends again. I don’t really remember what happened there, but I figured I wasn’t mad at her anymore. Once again, we were fast friends but now, we’re actually pretty similar. We like the same music and we laugh at the same jokes and we both loves dogs nd cats. Ali had also transitioned into becoming an emo just like me.
She liked MCR probably as much as me and we talked about them a lot. This time, she didn’t snap at me for talking about bands too much because now she understood. She understood my anger towards the breakup, but also understood my acceptance of it. In a way, the breakup brought us closer together. We always talk about Gerard Way, Mikey Way, Fall Out Boy, and probably most of all: Pete Wentz, and one day we even came up with nicknames for each other. We got our nicknames shortly after Ali said how she doesn’t like her name. I looked around for a second then came across her shirt, a Fall Out Boy shirt.
I said, “Well.. uh… Okay your new name will be Pete, like Wentz. I thought of that because saw your Fob shirt. ” A little bit later into the period I tried to text her, “Pete Terveen,” but instead, I spelled Terveen as ‘tercentenary,’ which turned out to be another word for a 300 year anniversary of a significant event. Pete300 was born and decided she needed a friend, and that’s where MWay (after Mikey Way from My Chemical Romance) came from. The real Pete and Mikey had been good friends in 2005, and they’re still friends to this day, ut for a while they didn’t even talk to each other.
Even though me and Ali didn’t talk before we had those names (instead of after, which would make the names seem like a curse), I guess the nicknames kind of fit what had happened to both us and them. Gerard Way once said, “My Chemical Romance is done. But it can never die. It is alive in me, in the guys, and it is alive inside all of you. I always knew that, and I think you did too. Because it is not a band- it is an idea,” and I think that even if, one day, I’m no longer friends with Ali, our friendship won’t actually be over.
It can never truly be gone because, even if we burn all of the photographs and text messages, it will still be alive in the both of us. It’ll be alive in me as the best friendship I ever had, and hopefully that’s how she feels, too. I believe we are much like My Chemical Romance because she has changed my just as much as My Chem has changed me and I thank both Ali and MCR for shaping me into the person I am today. We’re both emo and angry about My Chemical Romance’s breakup, and even though I’m sad about the breakup, I thank Gerard Way for calling it quits on the idea that is My Chemical Romance.
