there’s a piece of you that’s here with me, It’s everywhere I go, it’s everything I see, when I sleep, I dream and it gets me by, I can make believe that you’re here tonight…
I went to a Yellowcard concert last week. And of course, in typical me fashion, my thoughts have been swirling. Nothing frantic, but it feels like my brain is doing a puzzle and I’m watching it find each piece and smile when it fits. And maybe I’m reaching in this post, but it’s been a really long and heavy couple of weeks, and I’m just glad my brain seems to not be working against me for once (shrugs).
As usual, this felt important for me to write. And it’s not that I think I’m some profound writer or anything, but this journey has taken me places I never expected, and documenting the pieces is important to me. This is very much going to feel like one of those videos where someone is connecting crime scene photos with a red string on a board. It all connects, just try to stick with me here.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the audacity of time.
The thought first hit me during Ocean Avenue. There I was, standing in a crowd 23 years after the album came out, singing every word with a lump in my throat that seemed to appear out of nowhere. And before I could even figure it out, I was gone. Not physically, obviously. But in my head, I was suddenly back at Roseland Ballroom in 2004 – the first time I ever saw Yellowcard live. I was there with the wrong person. The kind of person who didn’t really want to be there, but came anyway. At the time, I thought he was giving me a gift. It would take me years to understand that some gifts come with invisible price tags attached. None of that mattered when I heard the opening notes of Ocean Avenue.
Yellowcard knows that’s their money song, and it’s always the last one they play. The whole album was great, but everyone was there for that song. As I was standing at the concert last week, I wasn’t just remembering that night, I was there. For a split second, the distance between 2004 and 2026 disappeared. That’s the thing nobody tells you about time. It doesn’t only move forward. Sometimes, it folds. One opening riff of a song and suddenly decades collapse.
I realized during Ocean Avenue that what I was feeling wasn’t just nostalgia. Yes, the song instantly transported me back to Roseland Ballroom. But it was more than that.
Ocean Avenue has been playing in the background of my life for over two decades.
And standing there last week, it wasn’t just that I remembered being 22 years younger. It was the sudden understanding that the girl standing in Roseland Ballroom had absolutely no idea where life would take her. She couldn’t have imagined the heartbreaks, the lessons, the people who would come and go, the versions of herself she would outgrow, or the ones she would have to fight to become. And she certainly couldn’t have imagined that one day, of all places, Sicily would change her life.
I know at this point you’re probably thinking: “Sicily?! How did we get here?”
This is the part where the red string board starts to look a little chaotic. But stay with me.
What I didn’t fully understand until I tried to say it out loud was how quickly my thoughts started tripping over themselves. The second I tried to explain it, everything got tangled. And that’s when I realized this connection isn’t linear. It’s not that the song predicted anything. It’s that it was already there, quietly weaving through time while everything else was changing.
Ocean Avenue wasn’t written for me, obviously. But the imagery in it, the longing, the distance, the pull toward somewhere just out of reach, somehow became part of the internal language I didn’t realize I was learning.
And there is something else I keep coming back to. Let’s just pull the red string up the board for a second. In 2024, Yellowcard had been “broken up” for a few years and, in collaboration with the band Hammock, reimagined some of their most well-known songs. And the version of Ocean Avenue was stripped down into something slower, more reflective, almost suspended. Like the song had grown up just like I had.
It was released the same month that I was taking my first solo trip to Sicily. Months after I had found my great-grandmother. Or she found me. And I’m not trying to make it some neatly arranged symbolic moment – I just mean that life was overlapping itself in a way I didn’t yet have language for.
In 2024, I was in the most existentially lost place I had been in a long time. There’s no delicate way to dress that up. Things felt unsteady, and I was moving through life in a way that didn’t feel anchored to anything I could fully name. But even in that, there was a pull. It was a quiet insistence toward certain things I still can’t explain. I kept following it anyway, even when I couldn’t articulate why it felt important. It didn’t make sense then. I’m not sure I completely understand it even now, but I’m finally starting to see the shape of it.
It wasn’t until my most recent trip to Sicily that the pieces began fitting together in a way I could finally feel. I was sitting on a rock by the water, watching the waves come in and pull back again, and something in me finally aligned with something outside of me.
And in my head I heard: let your waves crash down on me and take me away…
I’ve only been back from Sicily for about a month, and it’s taking me a little longer to process. But the truth is this: I was never someone who chased sunsets or thought much about the ocean. My life has always moved at a mile a minute, and I used to thrive in absolute chaos. But now chaos feels different in my body. Almost unsustainable.
Something shifted in a way I’m still learning how to name. And the connection between Ocean Avenue and Sicily was woven so quietly through everything that it didn’t fully click until that Ratatouille-like flash at the concert last week—when suddenly the entire timeline of my life with this song was there all at once.
The 23-year-old girl hearing Ocean Avenue for the first time has come a very long way.
And for most of that time, I think I believed not much had actually changed. I could still see her so clearly—convinced she had it figured out, convinced life was going to follow the shape she had already drawn. But it’s clear to me now that life doesn’t move in a straight line. It bends, and loops, and doubles back in ways you don’t notice until you’re standing somewhere completely different than you expected.
And I think what this song has done, quietly, over all these years, is stay steady while everything else shifted. Like that invisible red string running between memories, places, versions of myself, and moments that never seemed related until I stepped back far enough to see the whole board.
Time is audacious. But I recognize that it’s not necessarily a bad thing. Without it, I never would have made it from Roseland Ballroom to a rock on the coast of Sicily.
As always, thanks for reading. I hope you stayed with me through the red string, the board of memories, the puzzle pieces, the Yellowcard references, and the Sicily detour. It was a little chaotic, then again, so am I (shrugs). I’m always here if you need me.
if I could find you now things would get better, we could leave this town and run forever, I know somewhere, somehow we’ll be together, let your waves crash down on me and take me away…
Song name: OCEAN AVENUE/ Artist: YELLOWCARD/ Year: 2003
TALKING ON EGGSHELLS 