Nothing lasts forever, even brat summer

a journey to Rosemont feels like time travel

Every season is a transition, but something about this recent spring feels especially transitiony, to use a scientific term. It might have been the blur of returning home from a long trip, catching up on work, and dealing with some life stuff, but it seemed the trees on our block went from stark bare branches to erupting with full-blown leafy greenness in time-lapse speed. I can feel the positive effect on my mood each time I take the dog outside and am greeted with blossoming flowers and the chirping of birds. A friend once put it best that summertime is bursting with the slutty abundance of life.

In late April, the day after my forty-sixth birthday, I went to see Charli XCX’s Brat Tour at Allstate Arena in Rosemont on a Monday night. If you are from Chicago, the last two facts in the preceding sentence probably made you grimace a little bit. Allstate Arena is tenuously connected to the city by a patchwork of public transportation options that involve an unreliable bus. It’s usually faster to drive there, though it means your night will end with a parking lot traffic jam that’s more difficult to escape from than Alcatraz. The Monday night portion of this is self-explanatory; nobody wants to do anything on a Monday night.

I was willing to brave these dire conditions for one reason: Charli XCX’s Brat Tour. Brat was one of the breakout albums of summer 2024. Its slime green cover art went viral on t-shirts and, wildly, Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign. Brat wasn’t just an album but an ideology, a rallying cry empowering people to be as brash, bold, and messy as they want to be.

Charli XCX at Allstate Arena

Returning to Allstate Arena for a dance pop show was like traveling through a memory wormhole to the early 2000s when I strode those concrete hallways to see Britney Spears, a smuggled-in flask of vodka discreetly hidden into the low-rise waistband of my flared jeans. I was twenty-two years old, a party girl, not yet a party woman. And here I was, back in that same packed, sweaty concourse, a few decades older, carrying a knee brace in my purse just in case lol, having tipped the teeter totter into the back half of my forties, showing up for my favorite album that celebrates the vibe of city sewer sluts.

My sister and I hiked up the stairwell until we reached the 200 level where our seats were located. An usher pulled back the heavy curtain allowing us to enter the arena and EDM blasted into the hallway. My hair blew backwards like the man’s tie in the Maxell cassette commercial, a reference everyone around me was too young to understand. I fumbled my way into the dark arena, my pupils taking their time to readjust from the fluorescent light of the stairwell. After the DJ opener, Charli XCX sashayed onto the stage, alone with a microphone—no dancers, no band, no DJ. Just Charli, singing her heart out, dancing on the plexiglass catwalk, tossing her mane of curls, ditching her dress for a bra top and booty shorts. At one point, she spat on the stage, then licked it up while the audience roared. It was fantastic; I loved it.

Most of the crowd were closer to the age I was when I saw Britney, which made me reminisce to that time of my own life, remembering what it was like to be brat before I knew what that was. I was extremely shy and quiet throughout my childhood, and sometime around college, I overcorrected hard into an early brat prototype. I was tired of feeling invisible, so I became rowdy. Like the summer I was twenty-one and shopped at the neighborhood liquor store so frequently, the cashier asked me out to dinner. I’d regularly punch my friends in the stomach as my trademark greeting, sometimes to say hello, other times as a goodbye, like “aloha.” I’d stay out at karaoke night till 4 a.m., then show up for my 7 a.m. shift working in the pro shop at the local health club where I’d hide behind the counter dozing on a resistance ball until I had to ring up someone’s protein powder. “Guess I’m a mess and play the role” Charli sings in “I Might Say Something Stupid”—it’s like she knew me back when I put off getting my drivers license till I was twenty-three when I realized I could get my friends to drive me everywhere. While Charli sings of late-night clubs and tearing up London, my brat years were purely Midwestern: hazy memories of backyard keggers and stumbling home under streetlights while sprinkler timers sputtered on, raining on fresh cut grass.

A month ago, Charli XCX posted an image to her Instagram saying “maybe it’s time for a different kind of summer?” The reality of brat life is that it can’t last forever. My messy twenties evolved into my calmer thirties. I stopped going to every day of every Lollapalooza, then I stopped going to Lollapalooza completely and switched to Riot Fest, the official festival of the Middle Aged Gen Xer. I bought a Ford Focus, then traded it in for a Subaru. I am freshly forty-six years old, raw dogging aging besides the daily turmeric supplements for inflammation in the joints I absolutely thrashed playing roller derby. Sometimes I cringe thinking back, too many mornings waking up mortified over what I might have said, too many hangovers, while being relieved those years happened before camera phones and social media. But also, I own it, the rough-and-tumble mess of it all, every late night dancing till the wheels came off, the arm wrestling contests on sticky high boy tables, waking up with mystery bruises on my shins and trying to remember what dumb thing I dared to do. To quote the meme, I lived, bitch.

As we left the Arena, Lauren and I accepted our free promotional tote bags of Dove whole body deodorant samples and beelined for the car. It was unseasonably warm outside, a sheen of sweat from dancing slicking my face. We hightailed it out of the parking lot, beating the traffic jam. A perfect late spring night, the air heavy with humidity, the promise of summer and all of its potential.