When I was 13 years old I made a post on Gaia Online’s Life Discussion forum, and it’s probably still there if you look hard enough for it. The post is about this:
I was walking home from school when I passed by that one dead end street. It’s autumn and I’m wearing this nice new forest green jacket I’m in love with, the kind of faux-army chic that’s always in fashion. Some months later I would drive out to the beach with my family only for a bird to poop on it, which I’ve always considered to be a kind of divine punishment. On my head are some new Skullcandy-like headphones, listening to the latest Gorillaz album. This is also a band I got into because of Gaia Online: a friend I made there was an illustrator the likes of which I had never seen before, and they were also cooler and older than me so it just made sense I would listen to any album they would ever tell me about. I’m so excited to get home and start posting on Gaia, telling lies that I’m older than I am, that I live in Japan, that I have a cute girlfriend who looks like the emo girl of your dreams. I tell many lies like this all day on the internet in an effort to someday become that guy and also to maintain the charade with that friend. It doesn’t exactly register like lying because it feels like I’m on the way to that reality, or at least I hope I am.
Then I look down the dead-end street and I see this guy jump the fence that separates it from the ravine that cuts through my neighbourhood. He’s a little taller than me, also with some kind of unkempt brown hair, sparse facial hair, glasses, but the thing is he’s got these beat-up checkered Vans, which I think is odd for an adult man to wear since my only point of reference is 13-year-olds: myself also wearing the same shoes, and Noodle of Gorillaz in the music video for DARE. Sure, the year is 2010 and the checkered Vans never go out of style (have they ever?), but for whatever reason seeing this guy who looks like me but cooler and older on a dead-end street do something as strange as hop a fence puts this thought into my head: this guy is me.
I don’t mean we look alike or I want to look like him, no--I start dreaming a story in my head that this guy is literally me maybe ten or fifteen years from now. We pass each other by and I try to get a good look at my future self’s face. What message has he come here to deliver? Should I say something? Would that cause some kind of paradox? My future self stays silent and keeps walking. Dreaming about this guy’s life is a fun way to pass the time on the way back.
I get home and log into Gaia Online. I start writing this post about my experience, probably titled something like “Could this be real?!?!?!?!” The replies start coming in, because back then an insane amount of people used Gaia. Before the 4chan versus Tumblr wars, Gaia was the place where all the internet’s “cool art kids” hung out; the kinds of kids I idolized in middle school, the ones who would sit looking all affected on the steps at the west side of the school, just looking so insanely epic with their flat-ironed hair and Hot Topic trip pants imported from the US (we didn’t have them in Canada yet). If I couldn’t be them in real life, I could at least role play it online.
No one believes my shit, but I hold strong. I tell them it has to be me, no one else could wear those Vans, no one else could look disheveled in that special way, but most of all I just knew. Don’t you ever have those moments where you just know a family member is nearby or that your friend you’ve invited over is about to turn down your street? I kept typing away about how you couldn’t disprove my manic knowing.
Of course I was lying through my teeth, but this is what made using Gaia Online fun.
This all changed this year, 2023, myself now 26 years old. The strange thing about posting lies on the internet is that if you never log off eventually they become truths. I really do live in Tokyo now, I really am the age I said I was, and while I may not have the emo girlfriend of my teenage dreams I’ve been through the kinds of heartbreaks I imagined I would have by now. In some kind of strange summoning ritual I have gathered all the game consoles and handhelds I wanted when I was a kid, I learned Japanese and read all the books and manga I stared at the covers of on Google Images, I had the opinions I wanted to have and I believed them too, I had become the definition of chūnibyō while still managing to become a semi-functioning adult.
This story is about that kind of chūnibyō becoming real.
It’s like any other day, really. I’m walking through some dumbass part of Tokyo trying to find a reason to extend the road home: a book store, game center, maybe even a recycle shop. I find a nice shopping district in Musashi-Koyama, a quaint corner of Shinagawa Ward no tourist will ever have to set foot into. The foreigners you do see are dragging kids around, using coupons, going into discount diners--they’re just people scraping by all the same as the rest of us. I make my way through the series of Off secondhand stores: Book Off, Hobby Off, Hard Off (that one’s real, I promise), the list goes on. At Mode Off I look for the eternally in-fashion green coat, 2023 edition. I try a few on but they’re all on a rack labeled “MILITARY” which leaves a bad taste in my mouth, so I give up.
Then there is a shoe store. It’s a chain, but it’s not an Off. I wander in and the clerk is a young guy, maybe a little older than me. He asks if there’s anything I’m looking for and I said yeah, some sneakers might be good.
“Vans are very in right now,” he says.
“I haven’t worn Vans in a really long time,” I say.
“Why not?”
“My podiatrist told me if I keep wearing flat shoes then my tibia’s gonna snap right through my shin in my 70s and I’ll never walk again. So I wear these in-soles to make sure I’m always stepping onto a curve but they don’t quite cooperate with flat shoes like Vans.”
Small pause.
“Your Japanese is very good.”
“Thanks.”
“We have these new kinds of Vans actually, they’re designed for a softer touch than before.”
“Really? Then maybe I’ll take a look.”
The clerk goes into the back and returns with a box of Vans. He opens it up and I feel like Indiana Jones staring at some ancient golden artifact still glowing the same way it did thousands of years ago: they’re the checkered Vans of my middle school days. There’s something different about them, it’s true--the soles are squishier, the inside colour is different, but if you were to wear them they would look all the same to a passerby.
“Wow, these are more or less the same ones I wore in middle school.”
“You had good taste. Would you like to try them on?”
Okay, I say, and I untie my laces, pull out my old man in-soles, double check to see which one goes into the left foot and which into the right, and then slide them into the Vans. One shoehorn later and lo and behold my feet are once again snugly in the same shoes Noodle’s jumping around her bedroom in.
I tell the clerk I’ll buy them but he’s not there.
I am in a forest, a ravine, and there’s the rock I used to sit on when I was in middle school, hoping one day I would meet the emo girl of my dreams who would fall for my dashing pensiveness. It’s the Chatsworth Ravine, the one that runs around my middle school and through my neighbourhood, the one our parents warn us about because that’s where the bad kids do drugs, where the cool kids have sex, and where you’ll end up getting arrested.
It’s really not that serious: during the pandemic I walked through this ravine over and over to find anything at all I liked about my neighbourhood, but all I found was just people walking their dogs and the occasional couple of kids smoking weed not bothering anybody. The ravine that was so scary to me in my childhood was now just a path I had memorized, every nook and cranny down to the names etched into the bridge. The cold wind passes through, as nostalgic as it is biting. Tokyo is still too warm by Canadian standards this time of year, so I was only wearing a sweater. Before I can even assess the situation I decide I need to get to warmth and I follow the path back to my middle school.
A grown man emerging from the trees is never a good look, especially when what’s on the other side is a school. When I make my way into the school field I quickly make a dash to the other side that connects to the ravine again. There’s a hill by the school that leads back into it, but there’s an iron gate to stop kids from going in. It’s also private property, or at least I think it is. During the pandemic there was no need to guard this part of the ravine from 13-year-old stoners so it was left unlocked. I walked the path countless times then, but the small things I had paid close attention to were nowhere to be found: logs clearly placed in a circle with empty beer cans scattered around, signs of life like this leftover by bored teenagers trying to find any kind of fun at all to have in the lockdown--I should remember this because I would always mourn that kind of simple middle school life I felt I missed out on every time I walked by, wondering if spending my formative years lying on the internet was better for me than underage drinking. Then I look up the steep inclined hill that borders the path, and look for the huge houses that originally lobbied for that gate to be put up, but there’s something off. They’re not all there, and the ones that are seem shabbier than the renovated homes driving up the cost-of-living in my neighbourhood. Then it dawns on me: the same thing you’re thinking, the exact direction this story is heading. I start hurriedly walking up the hill to get back to the street and see what happened to those houses. The only thing left between me and understanding the nature of my bizarre Vans-induced vision is the picket fence that blocks off the ravine from the street.
Yes: I jump over the fence and am deposited into the street, a scraggly mangled mess.
Then there he is:
The most stressed child I have ever seen. His pose is so affected, not too straight but not too slouched either. The headphones sit on his head in such a way that each strand of hair is perfectly passing under the band, no curls or bunch-ups. A hand runs through the bangs that cover the acne on his forehead, and when the swipe of the hand isn’t enough he twists his head to the side like some kind of tick to make sure it swoops at the perfect velocity for it to settle just right. You can tell right after this motion he’s afraid he’ll be accused of imitating Justin Bieber, which is about the worst thing you can do in the year 2010. He pulls the strap of his over-the-shoulder bag that’s way too big for him so it doesn’t cover the collar of his cheap green H&M jacket, picks out the next song on his iPod Nano, then thrusts his hands in his pockets in such a way that the thumbs remain out, the same way all the cool emo kids on Gaia pose. He looks at me with a kind of bewilderment, and I have nothing to say to him.
We pass each other by and I can tell he’s nervous. I know if I say anything to him, if I tell him all those lies he’s telling online will come true, then he’ll think that’s the lamest thing ever because they’ve been done “before,” and he’ll become someone else entirely--the second his chūnibyō becomes real, it stops being exciting. So I just walk by, I don’t look at him, I don’t say anything at all.
But then I regret it.
Every terrible thing that happened to me in middle school does an instant replay in my mind. Every affected movement he makes is the result of some offhand comment someone made, some conversation he overheard and imagined it was about himself, and the perceived indifference of every person he told himself was a friend. That shitty little green coat is the only thing barely holding him together, and when that goddamn seagull shits on it just three months later it’s going to all come loose, he’s going to unravel, and I know I can save him a lifetime of stress if I just tell him he’s going to make it, it’ll all be fine, and everything he ever dreamed and more will come true.
But when I turn around to go after him I’m no longer in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, but Musashi-Koyama, Shinagawa Ward, Tokyo, Japan. The clerk is asking me if I’ll pay by cash or card. I tell him card, and he hands me the bag full of my middle school favourites. He tells me he enjoyed talking to me and that the next vacation he takes will be to Toronto. It’s not that great a place, I say, it only looks good in movies.
The Vans are 7000 yen, which is a lot of money for a graduate student. I start getting stressed out: why did I buy shoes I will probably never wear, just to fulfill something of that kid’s dream? Am I ever going to be able to wear them out? People will think I’m some lame skater wannabe, for sure. There’s no world where a 26 year old just wears checkered Vans like they’re nothing, like he’s so casually able to go outside and just say yeah, these? You remember the music video for DARE? Yeah, with that huge drunk British guy’s talking head? Yeah, they’re kind of a reference to that but it also, like, transcends it? Don’t get me wrong, I liked Gorillaz in middle school, and I was excited when they came back for Humanz and thought it was pretty okay, but everything after that is where I really dropped off. It’s weird because I can still go back and listen to those first three albums and still enjoy them wholeheartedly as an adult, not in that nostalgia-stained-with-retroactive-embarrassment way of listening to something like Arcade Fire or Vampire Weekend makes me feel. So then what is it about The Now Now and Cracker Island that make me so bored? I even had to Google the name of their most recent album just now because that’s how little a shit I give about it.
Wait, I was stressed about the Vans. This bag is so damn heavy. Why are Vans this heavy? Is it the weight of my chūnibyō sins? This is just like that time two years ago when I was in the US and went to the Hot Topic and saw trip pants for the first time since 2010 and seriously thought about buying them, but then I remembered I was 24 years old and not even remotely capable of wearing them. I left the store all upset and had my day ruined as I kept thinking about how I had missed my chance to wear trip pants, that even if I did it now it would be out of context, out of culture, just out in every sense of the word and even if I could muster the courage to wear them now it wouldn’t be the same feeling, the same vibe, I would just be inviting concerns of family and friends who already think I am becoming unemployable with each life decision I make.
Before I know it I’m already home and staring at myself in the mirror with these shoes on. When I’m looking at the lower half of my body I can almost imagine that the person up top is someone cool enough to wear them, but then my eyes trail back up to the dumpy 26 year old staring right back at me. So what if you learned all that kanji, who cares if you played all those video games, does any of it even matter? You’re still not cool enough to wear these shoes, dumbass.
But then that 13-year-old I saw in my bizarre timeslip adventure was just so excited to become me, that fantasy was so hard to resist he went home and told all those lies about becoming him, some random guy he saw on the street, a guy he saw and wished he could be--anyone other than himself. The problem was I can only ever be myself and nobody else, so even if I became that someone else I am still me, unfortunately. I probably made hundreds of posts on Gaia Online back then that I can barely remember, but that story about my future self has always stuck out in my head long enough that I bothered to write this at all. I lied about my life everyday on that website but that was the most blatant and impossible lie of all--that I could be someone I wasn't. I always think when I reach these milestones I imagined for so long that I should be so unrecognizable to myself that reflecting on my past should be like reflecting on a stranger. At times it is, but the stressed out look I saw on that kid’s face is the same thing brewing between the scrunched up eyebrows staring right back at me in the mirror. I’m still the same dissatisfied middle schooler wishing he was somebody else.
Fuck it, I’ll wear them anyway. If I keep feeling this way I’m going to feel cringe and uncool no matter what I wear, so we might as well go whole hog. The next day they’re on my feet and some friends comment how nostalgic they are, but no one says they look bad. I'm sweating bullets and say something like, “yeah, I used to wear them when I was in middle school and just thought why not!” Great, now I'm offering some kind of backhanded borderline justification for my reckless spending on the equivalent of clown shoes. All that's left is to wait for my friends to deliver the final blow, tell me I'm wearing a crossword puzzle on my feet, that I'm late for my ska band rehearsal, that I've never touched a skateboard in my life--in the words of Linkin Park: put me out of my fucking misery. Somewhere along the way I had closed my eyes to brace for it, but when I open them nothing happens. The conversation has moved on and no one says anything about it again. No one looks at me funny, and I become as inconsequential as every other salaryman on their subway ride home. The Vans have nothing to do with it.
When I get home I look in the mirror again and just see a guy wearing shoes. I can still be as cruel to myself as I was then, but this reflection is just me, some guy, and not that middle school student. I still see him sometimes: in my wrinkled brow, the crooked mouth I make when I’m nervous, the affected hand thrust into my pocket. Just as soon as I recognize him, though, he disappears back into the lyrics of songs I don’t listen to anymore by bands that populate long-since abandoned corridors of my psyche. Before I know it one day there’ll be no trace of him left, just an image to remember and nothing more. Maybe that’s what becoming an adult is; either that or it’s when you can buy checkered Vans and not have to write 3000 words about it.
February 2nd, 2024