There’s a scene in The Sorrow and The Pity in which the interviewer climbs down into the cellar of two former French Revolution fighters of World War 2. In prior shots we see these two ex-fighters working the field, suggesting them as peasants and being close to the land. Inside the cellar, one of them fills up multiple glasses of wine from a rustic looking barrel. They all sip the wine and the whole scene seems musty and cozily damp and dark. Despite this film being black and white, and somewhat grainy, my mouth waters at the sight of this wine, particularly homemade wine made in France, which has the stereotype attached to it of probably being superior tasting wine. Later that evening I’m in Safeway and decided to get red wine instead of my typical moscato or prosecco, which I mix with any kind of fruit juice. It’s somewhat embarrassing at having to buy wine in Safeway, and seeing that they sell hard liquor now shocks me. While circling the few aisles they have I’m confused by the prices in which seem absurdly high. This is when I realize I am unconsciously being snobbish. I lived in Italy for the past four years, and the wine there is cheaper than water. I remember being confused the first time I saw the prices of the wine there, disoriented by the comma being in place for a decimal. At first I thought these wine bottles were in the thousands, but questioned why there were only 3 digits. Such is the naivety of a foreigner who is accustomed to a world which works in a way easily understood. Anytime I mention Italy I instantly feel somewhat embarrassed that it may seem I’m trying to seem cool or travelled. And then when I realize I’m thinking that, I realize that it does mean I think it’s cool that I lived in Italy, which is probably due to our culture’s built up idea that everyone ought to visit Italy to have this change of life experience. If you’re worried about someone thinking you’re an asshole, chances are you’re probably doing something that makes you an asshole. Anyway, I lived in Italy for four years, and there’s no way to take a position of saying that without being afflicted by harsh self-criticism.  I’m at the cashier and it’s time to hand him my I.D. and without fail all these fantasies come to mind that he’s going to think I’m giving him a fake I.D.  It really, really annoys me at having to be carded. In the 10ish months I’ve been back to America, I’ve been carded every single time I buy alcohol, but in the four years I lived in Italy, and the multiple countries I travelled, I was carded 0 times. In these fantasies I always suppose the cashier wanting to land that kid trying to use a false I.D., in which I imagine is me, and become nervous that it’s going to happen. I leave the store with my 15 dollar bottle of wine, which would probably be 2 euro in Italy, and look at the entrance of the store as the light to my key flashes red as it unlocks the door. A sudden memory flashes back of a watermelon, harry potter books, and a really shitty ’94 Honda Prelude.

I came up with the term Gigantic Hearts to put a signifier to this unexplainable feeling in a particular moment of my life. I’ve only shared it with one other person, but she knew that nostalgic feeling I was trying to purvey. When I was 16 my parents finally divorced and my mother was set free. I was happy because I had the house without parental supervision, and a crew started to form of neighborhood kids. The real driving force behind what sparked Gigantic Hearts was a brother and sister moving into a house nearby. You read about these kind of people in coming-of-age stories, being the main character who opens up the narrator’s eyes. One of the first times I’d met the brother, he was playing an acoustic and just singing random shit that popped in his head, in a two story house with absolutely nothing in it. I escaped to that house often, lying on the floor beside Stephanie, hers and my story being another long affair. I’d been dumped by a girl I dated for around 3 years a few months before this, and felt extremely free and thought it would do me good to just not give a fuck for a while. Every Wednesday this group would meet up at night and drink stolen beer, skipping school the next day. The way we stole beer was to drive to multiple Safeways in different cities past midnight, walk into the front door, and grab as many cases as we could hold and run out screaming back to the car. My buddy actually knocked one of the sliding doors off its hinges once, which I didn’t know possible, thinking it was going to shatter. Sometimes instead of instantly stealing the beer we would scout around and walk through the aisles. I managed to collect the whole series of Harry Potter by stealing them from Safeway. We decided one day to throw an epic party that you always hear about, and I knew that I had to take charge to ensure this would happen. My buddy and I decided to stock up beer in a month’s time and store it in the shed. We got my mom to buy us dozens of cartons of cheap cigarettes and some hard liquor. When the party happened, there were hundreds of people crammed into my tiny house. We had bowls of cigarettes everywhere and a beeramid stacked to the ceiling. My friend who’d just moved here put a local band’s song on the ipod and someone in the audience was singing along with it, who turned out to be the actual singer, and then later on in the years he became the singer in my old band.

I developed a really bad cocaine addiction during these months-year, and a lot of the days were endless blurs or void. I missed a ton of school, but managed to keep good grades due to the flawed importance of test scores. One day the friend who had become so close very begrudgingly took me to Tacoma where I bought some cocaine, terrified I was going to get busted at every minute. You had to use a portable battery charger to start the car every time and you could only enter through the driver’s side. He was pretty mad at me about doing something so sketchy, and I remember one day collapsing on his floor and the look of worry on his face. A few days before we were stuck in unbelievable traffic, under the glaring sun, without a radio. We almost made it through singing the whole Bright Eyes album, I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning, just on the top of our heads. He was the first to take me to shows, and skipping school to go to Seattle became a normal thing. I started to have a naïve contempt for my peers in high school, because their lives seemed so boring and superficial, whereas I was seeing shows, meeting bands, doing drugs, and stealing things. What got me to quit was one night two close friends who I’d grown up with drew a gun on me and told me that I had to stop doing drugs, and they hated seeing who I was becoming. It kind of shook me out of my stupor, and they’d described personality and behavioral changes they’d seen of me, which I denied vehemently, but I’m sure now were true. It’s interesting to think of how much care my old friends had for me, even if it may not seem so, and how I have nothing like that now, despite being an adult, with the exception of those I deployed with, who I will forever love more than family.

As I look at the Safeway entrance, I realize it’s the one we stole watermelons from the outside entrance, throwing them in the intersection nearby. I live minutes from here, and it just now occurred to me. On these drives home from the stealing trips, I always had this melancholy which latched on to my anxiety so acutely. I’d quit doing cocaine fully cold turkey, but with it came the most severe anxiety I’ve ever had. I thought I was going to die at every second. One day we decided to steal food, and 2 carts later, running across the empty parking lot, we shoved all we could in the trunk and drove quickly to a nearby neighbor and parked, sitting in an alcove laughing. It was here this sorrow struck me most deep, and I thought I would never have a group of close friends such as this again, and in a sense it’s true. Around the fire of my backyard, in which we placed a circle of thrown out couches, we sipped beer and escaped everything together. I wish I could go back in time to those sorrowful moments in which I wished the moments would never end, and shake myself out of that turmoil. The separation of our group was slow, and one by one time takes us to different places despite our wishes to remain in each other’s company. My anxiety eventually died away, and I never really made close friends like that until moving to Italy. In a way, it’s interesting to reflect how so many negative actions are eclipsed by the love a group of people form of each other in seeking great memories.