June 20, 2025 - Growing into yourself is a lot of walking blind. Feeling around in darkness with your eyes closed, using the cool, slick walls as a roadmap. Recently I have found myself thinking a lot about this process of touching confidence and losing hold of it again just as quickly. Carrying a wretched fondness for the past while living through its aftermath. I’m confused and taken aback by myself in ways that make me laugh; the person I used to be is a child I’m constantly babysitting. Do not put your finger in the outlet.
The time in which I first encountered Gabe Perez is one of those times I’m unduly wistful for. We met as so many people do between Brooklyn and Boston— by playing one show together and only seeing each other in passing, or online, ever since. Becoming reacquainted with their voice in preparation for the release of “if you saw me now” throws me back into that time, the soup of 2023, and all the times before folded up inside, for better or for worse.
There’s a laid-back lull to the song that unfolds into disjointed rhythm. As if it’s learning, limb by limb, how exactly it should dance in a crowd of people who seem to know what they’re doing. Do my arms go up? Do my hands look stupid in my pockets? The harmony is unexpected and supplemented by gorgeously dialed fuzz— by the climax of the song, a tentative head nod has become jumping, flailing, moving for movement’s sake. “Backflips on your trampoline taught me to be brave”, Perez sings in the comedown. Admittedly I’ve never even tried to backflip, but I remember being crouched on the outside of the trampoline net in the dark, dodging outstretched arms, acting fearless, acting big. Holding underneath the surface the wail of the even smaller child inside. Still afraid of walking the halls at night, hands as a guide. Running to the safety of my bedsheets.
It might be reductive to internalize something solely based on what it reminds you of. But isn’t that what everything is? An unavoidable look back; a comparison even when there is none due? I’m fascinated by understanding, and the lack thereof: we are constantly imprinting and projecting. We theorize around the shape of people, and rarely ever do we reach the marble of their whole and realized self. The thing that grows in the hole one leaves, this power in absence, also influences the orbit of the present self and past self. The inherent misunderstanding between a version of yourself you recognize but no longer identify with, the things you don’t yet comprehend about yourself as you are (and won’t without leaving yourself behind), and the motion to bridge those gaps somehow. Resentment indebted only to ourselves. If I linger too long in a memory, anger appears like dappled light. Sadness permeates the invisible wall. Whoever is narrating “if you saw me now”, whatever version of Perez or some voice from the ether, feels timid, trembling, warbling. They speak to someone who may never hear them. Their voice sounds like someone I miss.
“if you saw me now” by Gabe Perez is out now on all platforms.
