I (don’t) Know the End
Unpausing my life by pressing play
Jessica Opfer
Katie Preston
I’m screaming. Not at one person, and certainly not at myself.
My emotions weren’t fueled toward the crowd of people I stood in, or targeted at “the artist currently known” as Phoebe Bridgers, as her Twitter bio used to read.
My voice drowned in more than 5,200 other screams, but mine still felt the loudest.
This concert, in the fall of 2021, was my first in two years. I’ll admit, prior to 2021 I’d heard Bridgers’ name only a handful of times.
I already had my music. My playlists were filled with all the sorts of classic rock sounds you could want: dad-rock, folk rock, psychedelic rock and any other label people love to affix in front of the word.
But none of those artists or songs were ever truly mine.
***
It has been now six years since my dad’s skiing accident that left him with a traumatic brain injury (TBI). In six years, there have been no more yearly vacations to Salt Fork State Park. No more movie nights with our 3D Blu-ray DVD player. No more slope-side ski trips in New York. No more song discoveries hand-picked from his collection just for me.
No more of him, as he truly was, and no more of myself, as I truly was.
At 15 years old, I was left with my learner’s permit and a box of vacation souvenirs collecting dust in my closet.
The one person who made me feel content yet confident in my own self was ripped away from me in a matter of seconds. He could no longer be there for me and had unknowingly placed that hat onto myself to wear for the both of us.
I followed my dad’s every move. From helping change the oil in his 2014 white Honda Accord, which became my first car, and then my sisters, to binging “Modern Family” and staying up late every other week to watch — the often inappropriate for my age — “Saturday Night Live.”
His hobbies became my hobbies, his shows became my shows, and most formatively, his music became my music.
My most vivid memories are those of Pink Floyd dancing throughout my childhood home. At an impressively young age, I shredded my Barbie guitar in front of the television as Pink Floyd’s “Pulse (Live)” album flashed across the screen.
Next to towering CD shelves in the basement, Gilmour, Rogers, Mason and Wright radiated from my dad’s stereo, which stood taller than me, as we raced 1:32 slot cars around his self-made race tracks.
After school, their psychedelic sound bounced through my ears in my dad’s, then, 2008 Belize blue Honda Accord as we headed home.
Anytime we swam at the pool, played tennis or went for a golf cart ride, they were sure to be on. We even became known at our marina for it one summer and a total stranger gave me a Pink Floyd beach towel.
I never imagined an end to that storyline. So soon in my life, and without any real conclusion. I could no longer listen to a single chord from the guitars of David Gilmour or Roger Waters without tears or my mind going into a daze.
Pink Floyd had been my escape, and the only one I knew. I kept wearing my band t-shirts to school, but it felt unfair that he wasn’t there to see it. I had to take down all my Floyd posters and put them in the back of my closet at my mom’s. I put a smile on my face for the sake of others, but it was never really there.
Everything I knew about myself seeped away each day that he was gone. Entire parts of my brain closed off with an “out of order” sign.
Voids crept into my personality. I was floating through life without any identity, and my music taste was hiding in some dark corner of my brain, shivering.
Then someone mentioned the name Phoebe Bridgers as a recommendation over Snapchat. I didn’t think much of it at first. I didn’t have years of memories paralleled to her lyrics. She wasn’t something I’d always known or I had handed to me. Finding music on a whim was foreign territory.
The Spotify gods took the reins, and Bridgers popped out to me atop a randomly generated playlist that same week. Seven minutes and 55 seconds later, “Motion Sickness” and “Georgia” rested at the top of my liked songs.
Each song started to scratch an itch in my brain. Driving down the back roads of northern Ohio, I bounced between Bridgers’ debut, “Stranger in the Alps,” and her sophomore album, “Punisher.”
The songs started to fill the spaces that had sat vacant in my mind for nearly two years. Her lyrics were charged with so much emotion that channeling my feelings into what she’d written came naturally.
Bridgers’ songs now give me the same drumming-of-the-steering-wheel reaction that Pink Floyd does (did).
“I Know the End” is best listened to at night in the car — bonus points if there’s a storm. Or when the power goes out and candles are the only source of light in the room.
“Scott Street” strikes the perfect chord when pulling out of a hometown friend’s driveway knowing they’ll be a stranger for a few months.
“Funeral” breaks my heart while reminding me that this all could be worse.
***
On a whim, I bought two tickets to her show in Columbus, Ohio, a few months before my first-year of college.
I attended my first concert with my dad the year of his accident, seeing a tribute band, Wish You Were Here: Sights and Sounds of Pink Floyd, at the historic Ritz Theatre in Tiffin, Ohio. Attending Bridger’s “Reunion Tour” in 2021 was my first concert without either of my parents.
The lyrics that provided me with a new love for music were being sung 30 feet away from me. It was paralyzing, yet surreal. It’s been two and a half years since that show, and I’ve come to understand why my screams were the loudest.
As her closing song, “I Know the End,” built, my body was covered in a wave of goosebumps.
Bridgers told me “the end is here,” so there it was.
I got to scream at the universe for the hand of cards I’d been dealt, but I also got to start learning how to play them. And learn how to, as Bridgers taught me, find a new place to be from.
Last June, I saw Bridgers again as a member of the supergroup Boygenius alongside bandmates Julian Baker and Lucy Dacus. That night marked the second time I got to hear Bridgers’ song “Graceland Too” live.
This time, she sang it with the person it was written for – Baker – echoing a sentiment I’m constantly reminded of.
She said she knows she lived through it to get to this moment.
My dad and I listen to our music now when we’re together. His face lights up the dim healthcare center when he recognizes who it is. Without fail, he almost always says two words.
“It’s Floyd.”
