At seventeen, I wished to be more angular. All my coats were black wool, with sharp shoulders and holes in the pocket linings from where I pressed my bunched-up fists into the seams whenever I went anywhere. I could barely contain myself, and the twin bed in my single-occupancy dorm room certainly couldn’t –– I’d always slept in a double, even as a little kid –– so I’d go out walking. After midnight, even. In the rain, with my fists in my pockets, I climbed up and down hills and blinked water out of my eyes and thought about cold hard things, winter dawns and skyscrapers and wet pavement and the hearts of the men I thought were real artists.
I was in love, or I thought I was. I wanted to drop out of school and move to New York City with this boy who, at the time, seemed a paragon of worldliness; now, looking back, I see with a tender pang how silly and soft both of us were, him barely eighteen with a full head of cherub curls that Facebook tells me he’s since shorn and both of us maudlin with visions of the big city that could only have been conjured by a couple of provincial Midwesterners. He was a hometown boy, and I was a big fish from the same small pond who’d moved a thousand miles away to become ensconced in what I was quick to denounce as an ivory tower of bullshit, and both of us were very, very embarrassing, but at the time, I wasn’t embarrassed about any of that.
What did embarrass me was loving this song. I listened to it over and over during those long walks, and I am quite sure I never told him about it. He played jazz –– god, he played jazz, he literally wanted to move to New York and play jazz, in the 21st century! Can you fucking believe? –– and I was just some girl whose stomach flipped over watching his big hands move knowingly up and down the neck of his double bass. He knew so much about music and I knew nothing about anything, as I’d quickly realized flipping through textbooks for the junior-level metaphysics class I’d so eagerly enrolled in. I’d give up on my readings two pages in and walk to the edge of the slope as the lamppost lights were turning on and sit in the damp grass with my knees pulled tight to my chest, shivering, staring into clouds and listening to in a town that’s cold and grey / we will have a sunny day, and I never told him about how that felt.
I ate a slice of cake at the dining hall every day and grew soft at the edges. I layered white lace and let my hair start growing long, learned how it curled in the east coast mist. Sometimes I wore pearls. I skipped class to read in the library armchairs, fairytales and Sylvia Plath, words I kept close to my chest even as I skyped him eagerly about Isaac Asimov until early morning light. I thought I wanted him to have all of me but I couldn’t show him any of what I considered to be these babyish trivialities; I wanted to be serious. I wanted to be cool, to prove that the solitude which swallowed me would turn me into an artist and not just a dreamer. I wanted to prove that I was like him and not just some girl.
Sometimes, sleep-deprived, I’d sing into my laptop, under my breath, as a test –– to see how I looked, if my voice was sweet, if I had any music in me. If I seemed feasibly lovable. When I play back those photo booth videos now, my blurry baby face murmuring you don’t know but that’s okay / you might find me anyway, halfway between a whisper and a hum so I didn’t wake any of the girls on my hall, I think, which one of us is talking, and to whom? I am so proud of her, that small me. She couldn’t have known, then, that it would be like this. That it would be fine. So often then I wanted to kill what was soft in me and now I am made stronger by the knowledge that she is still a part of me, that even this many years later my heart harbors the same bright reflexive leap upon hearing the flutter of notes at the beginning of this song.
I was so alone, those days. I was lonely, too, but more importantly, I was alone, and I see now how lucky I was to have had all that space to stretch out. When I hear this song now I don’t think about him at all. I think about me, seventeen, so young and so brave, stepping carefully down the sidewalk so as not to slip on the ice even carrying a heart wrenched sideways with sorrow. One of the theories that stuck with me from that ill-begotten metaphysics class is that all time exists at once, and I wonder: when I was her, and she was there, drifting in and out of sleep at half past three in the morning, floral comforter clutched to her chest, praying to feel perfectly adored for even just one second, did she feel it? Did she feel what I feel now? And if so, I wonder if what she felt was me, here, now: my love flowing back through time to join up with my own glowing ghost. I love her. I love her so much. The secret of all songs attached to past lives is that when you do enough growing you can look back and see what was really happening. If you’re lucky you learn that the person you were really working to make the love of your life is your own weird self. Don’t you know that I / belong arm in arm with you / baby?
-c
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