memories of the chicago that was mine
three years ago plus six months ago i sat in someone else’s bed in ridgewood, queens and started making a playlist of all the songs that “represented chicago” to only myself. the bed wasn’t mine because i was subletting it, from someone i still haven’t actually met, who, with her husband, had traveled to california for five months and asked me if i wanted to stay there. it was 2020 when she asked and i had been at my parent’s house for a long time and because of other reasons at least some of this might eventually explain.
i sat in my friend-i-haven’t-yet-met’s bed and felt the wind through the 2nd floor window and felt the linen of the curtains and felt the bed that i was at least used to by that point and started thinking about Chicago. i didn’t live there then. i lived in new york city, but i was thinking “do i like new york city enough to stay here?” and i didn’t really get anywhere with that thought because it was 2021 and what really was anywhere in early 2021? i told myself “you can’t go back to chicago,” because i had left chicago, three years earlier, and i had convinced myself out of horror that “i didn’t belong there,” that it “wasn’t mine anymore,” as if a city itself can tell you to leave (though it did, kind of, once, in 2017, but we’ll get into that, i guess).
so i made a playlist of songs that felt like chicago. that smelled like it, that had the ability to time-travel my close-eyed little head directly back to a certain year. i’d moved to chicago in 2005. that was a lot of time to cross, a long line to draw. i picked songs, i tinkered for months (though it came together huge and fast), and it’s mostly exactly correct today (i just moved one song to a more chronologically honest position instead of a thematically one). i would go on walks at night with the playlist on and walk by bars that were just starting to open again but i’d never go to them, while a song from 2008 would yell at me from the past. it made me feel, and it made me remember.
i said to myself: i’m going to try to write a little bit about all of the songs. sometimes the explanations won’t make sense. sometimes they will be entire worlds into a self i barely was. sometimes it will just be “in 2008 i listened to this song a heck of a lot.” but that’s what made up all the different me-s of 2005-2018. a lot of songs played on my way to the rest of my life.
(i am not going to do all of this; at least not right now. i’m sorry, maybe. i don’t know why i’m sharing this, anyways. maybe it’s dumb of me. maybe it’s not. i don’t know. life is crazy and i feel crazy right now. this life, this one i was trying to describe, is dead. maybe it’s not yet time to memorialize it like this, but at the same time… i’m going to lose these memories, soon. they’re already so lost. okay.)
college, animal collective
a lot of the first section of songs comes from another playlist, the soundtrack i had made to a semi-abandoned webcomic called FEELS. FEELS was a 75% true autobiography of “my time in art school.” i really loved writing it and drawing it and a lot of people seemed to like it (a lot of my friends who “were there” really liked it, for different reasons— i remember one friend of mine, in 2015, asking “hey can you make it so i break up with my girlfriend and date that other girl i should have dated” and i said “man that just ain’t how it works, sorry” and i meant the “sorry”— i wish i could have changed his life just as much as i could change my own.) “college,” with its one fucked-up beach boys-sung lyric of “you don’t have to go to college,” was both the advice i should have listened to and what i wanted the theme song for FEELS to be.
here’s how FEELS began: a shot of the sears tower from afar, which pulls back to show a family driving along the highway. they call up a family friend, the one who went to the art institute of chicago, and called it the ‘tute (i would soon find out that no one really called it that). it’s my mom on the phone. she says “we’re about to enter chicago! should we get off the highway?” he says “what street are you at” and she says “um… 63rd!” and he says, “did you bring a shotgun?” this is a true story, and it’s the one that makes my first memory as a chicagoan. six years later i’ll work at a coffee shop on 63rd. i won’t need a shotgun.
(i stopped making FEELS in 2016, after Trump got elected and the world started sliding into a weird fascist slow burn (it’s still there). a comic about a bunch of white art students felt ridiculous in the face of Trump (i don’t know if this was ever really true, but it felt too true to ignore at the time). i said “semi-abandoned” because FEELS would up having a point that felt like a good-enough ending even if i had it planned out for another three years.)
the day after we got into town (we had driven from albuquerque. it took two full days. the night before we’d left albuquerque i had gone to a Coldplay concert), we loaded into the dorms. it was a line around the block of state, randolph, washington, and the alleyway next to the dorms, hundreds of parents all lined up and yelling. i had to go to the bathroom. my parents said “well why don’t you go up to your new dorm room, we’re far back in line,” so i ran up and went inside and my new roommate (i already knew him; he was the friend who asked me to change his life. we’d met the year before during the summer program we went to, it’s why we both moved to chicago. we felt excited and relieved to know that we would start college already knowing people). we talked for a little, i used the bathroom, my parents were already calling me, i waited for the elevator, which was obviously busy. i ran down eight flights of stairs, then realized you couldn’t actually take the stairs all the way down (there were offices from another building on the 2nd floor). i finally made it back out; my parents were already unloading the car. we yelled at each other. we’d been in the car for so long.
faking the books, lali puna
once everyone settled in, more or less, we all got our promised laptops, and we all figured out how to steal music. man, there is no better place to be on a peer-to-peer file sharing network (and we were all on a network— in 2005, the dorms didn’t have wi-fi; all our laptops had to be plugged in via ethernet) than in an art school dorm. i feasted on tunes way weirder than “faking the books.” i don’t know anything about lali puna. i know that my dorm roommate freshman year (the same guy who wanted me to change the outcome of his life in a webcomic. we’re still friends, mostly. that’s not true of a lot of people who will come up here) had this song playing and i asked him “hey who is this” and “if i could get it burned on a CD” and so that was the first time i heard about “OurTunes” which was just a variation on soulseek but before i had heard of soulseek.
but “faking the books” has to be on the list because it gets the “slow motion walking down brand new hallways” feeling that freshman year felt like. kind of sad, because everyone missed their hometown (even if they pretended not to), and kind of exciting because everything was new and shiny and cool (even if it was terrifying). “faking the books” feels like that, even if it also feels like it could have been on Grey’s Anatomy.
my roommate played a lot of music i’d never heard before. it was mostly what we now call “indie rock.” it was just music then, though the name “indie” had already started to grow. i have a memory of a girl with an animal’s name in the summer program showing me pitchfork, and i checked it during lunch hours. they had an interview with jeff mangum up there. i started to learn a certain way of being into bands, then. it only grew from there.
the first two weeks we were just hungry, not mean about music. we just wanted more. my roommate had heard of the postal service. i didn’t know anyone else had, because i didn’t have a way to know that yet. he had lost his virginity to “such great heights.” he told me the album reminded of how he and his girlfriend used to drive to the airport to go on dates. it felt so strange to hear about people’s lives; they were as long and complicated as my own. i wasn’t used to meeting strangers on a level like this. before, my friends were just the people i had known for the longest time. i gathered experiences at the same rate as they did, and a lot of those experiences were shared, anyways. now i was meeting people with unknowably huge lives. it made me feel lonely then, instead of exciting.
a thing i always say about “art school” is that freshmen year there is brutal because every high school’s One Freak goes there. so the school is filled with One Freaks. but when everyone is a freak no one is a freak. the things that made us unique didn’t matter anymore; we were all the same. everyone had to deal with this in their own way. it took maybe a little longer for a hierarchy to come out than usual because of this.
be gentle with me, the boy least likely to.
a friend of mine made a tiny book of drawings and type-written text out of this song. it was at least as twee as this song was, which is probably the twee-est song i still have tolerance for. but it was 2005, everyone had a taste for twee. Garden State was still cool (it only had about six months left of that being true), and everyone loved Belle and Sebastien, and most of us didn’t yet have a problem with Death Cab for Cutie. you could just be a guy with a xylophone and a banjo and get pretty far exactly that way.
i like this song still because i have too many memories of late night dance parties in the dorms to this song or one of the thousand songs that sound exactly like it. reckless abandon in a kitchenette. watching the knit scarf bounce back and forth over tight striped shirts. beanies falling off, getting kicked by uggs and flattops. wondering how people can dance in jeans that tight and that low. everyone afraid of all this new and the people we were dancing with were starting to feel like friends and we all needed everyone to go easy on us. yelling in unison, “be gentle with me!” because that was all we wanted.
since i had at least a brief crush on everyone i ever knew, i had a crush on the friend who made the tiny book. i told another friend about it, and we laughed at each other. later i just became friends with her, and he went out with her. at a party two years later, out on a chicago wood-porch maze, she said, drunk “____ told me you said you had a crush on me freshman year!!!!” and everyone spat their drinks out. everyone was silent, and then we laughed about it. it was a gentle moment.
you only live once, the strokes.
exactly one half hour before writing this paragraph i said out loud “maybe this is a hot take, but this is the strokes’ best song and it’s not even close.” maybe it is a hot take, maybe it doesn’t matter (both can be true). this the first song in this playlist that i still listen to, that i’ll still put on because i have to hear it. it’s still a song that has appropriate placement in my life today, not just as some relic from a dead life. but let’s try to explore what it felt like to hear at the time. and it felt… difficult? first impressions of earth was no one’s favorite strokes record at the time— i still think “juicebox” was a terrible first single (it’s also a terrible song to follow “you only live once” with). it’s astonishing to realize that “you only live once” is literally called YOLO but we didn’t say “YOLO” then so it was just, at most, a weird James Bond pun. “you only live once” started the record and it sounded great and then “juicebox” followed and who the heck remembers the rest of the album? to me it fills the same memory-room as stadium arcadium, which this album sounds like a lesser version of (and stadium arcadium is not actually good!)
now that i think about it, “you only live once” should move in this playlist to around 2012, and this the memory that says why:
sitting at my desk, watching the trailer for sofia coppola’s somewhere, a movie i still have never seen, realizing the song playing in the trailer is so familiar because it is the demo of “you only live once,” grabbing my guitar and trying to figure out how to play that song, my girlfriend saying from the other room, “i know what you’re up to in there,” and me feeling embarrassed, half because it is lame to be figuring out how to play a Strokes song, but also because i can’t quite figure it out. i give up. i still haven’t seen the movie somewhere, and i still can’t play “you only live once” on guitar.
the skin of my yellow country teeth, clap your hand say yeah
one night, my across the hall dorm neighbor (once we were all friends, we all left our doors open, we were on the 8th floor and we called our little group “floor 8 amalgamation,” because there was a bank down state street called “amalgamated bank of chicago,” and we all thought it was silly and funny) stayed up all night playing this song on repeat (another night he stayed up all night listening to the talking heads’ “this must be the place” and the arcade’s fire cover of “this must be the place”). the next morning he was asleep at his desk and we asked “man… is he okay?” he was fine, just performatively moody. i appreciated that.
a lot of these songs are so “exactly this moment,” where “this moment” can stand in for a decade’s worth of years. this song is huge in the initial days of chicago, a revelation that didn’t make sense given the simplicity of the song itself. a decade later, after i knew how to write songs, i listened to this again and thought “this is so simple, this doesn’t make any sense, why is it so good.” the song still doesn’t make sense to me, but it’s perfect, in it’s tiny, dated way.
it soundtracks a lot of train rides. something about that “do do Ping do do Ping do do Ping, beeooo beeooo, beeooo beeooo” guitar line in this song feels like the positive anxiety early experiences on public transit can give you. something about that loping drum line feels like it, too.
it feels that kind of kinetic excitement riding a train in a city you don’t quite know, in a way that you can’t quite now. i think about how much i hate my phone, and how addicted to it i am, in a small but brutal way. the way that my life just can’t shake the need to look at it every minute. i remember train rides, and i remember, distantly, the early days of “not knowing where i was going,” of having to figure out how to get places on my own. i wonder now, if i ever really did— if i relied on friends to walk with to get where i needed to. chicago, at least, is easy to live by train (it’s why i went there again). it’s easier when you don’t yet have a commute to get to school. the train is just “exciting,” instead of “stressful,” though the two can fold hand in hand.
it’s so interesting to remember “where we went” early on in freshman year. it was as if there wasn’t a subway line other than the one outside the dorm. we’d only take it up to the Belmont Red Line and eat at Clarke’s, which was a shitty restaurant made to feel like a diner. the food was never good, and if we’d know better we could have all saved a lot of money going there. but we went there, sometimes once a week. one night we decided to dress up in our nicest outfits and go there, not for any occasion, just for the heck of it. freshman year was a time for doing things i’d never do again— some of that was hanging out with certain people i stopped hanging out with, sure. but some of it was the friends i had made hanging out with “suggested friends,” people that someone’s parents knew…’s cousin’s friend, or something like that. a friend and i had a nice dinner with her aunt in a high rise higher up the red line than i’d ever go again. with another friend i went to a house party off the end of the purple line. another friend and i had a fancy dinner with a bunch of high schoolers in lakeview. i’d barely go to any of those places again. after freshman year, most of us moved to apartments off the blue line, and the red line became a wasteland to me.
but it was all new in those first months. new and a challenge. you couldn’t just check your phone every second to make sure you were on the right way. you just had to know, and it’s wild to think that i just… learned.
here comes the summer, the fiery furnaces.
this one belongs in two places— i learned about it before college, from a girl i used to have a huge crush on but then through one adolescent accident (i was sitting, age 18, at the goth cafe where we’d all met, and she said “it’s my birthday next week” and i asked “oh cool, what birthday is it,” and she said “oh, i’m turning 15” and i tried not to spit my drink out) realized we’d make better friends, and that was true, and we talked on AIM and through livejournal, and she sent me a lot of music that i didn’t know about that i still really like to this day, and this song by the fiery furnaces was one of those songs.
yet this friend always sent me single songs, never full albums. so the other foot in the door this song represents is the beginning of the friendship that would define my entire college experience and a lengthy hangover afterwards. this friend would give me full albums, he would yell about music, the first new friend that i could really do that with, and even if he often couched it in that kind of “what do you mean you’ve never heard of ____” (which i knew he did because he was new to being in a position of social power and was figuring out how much abuse of it he could get away with— turns out, kind of a lot), i still appreciated learning about new music from him, or learning the new depths of things i thought i already knew about.
(here, i’ll tell you how we first met: i’d seen him in the dorm lounge the first night of college, where young new strangers sat and tried to do ice-breakers and wound up watching a guy freestyle. we both got off the dorm elevator on the same floor two weeks later, turned the same corner, and realized we lived next door to each other. “well, uh. i guess we’re neighbors,” he said. “yup,” i said, and basically ran into my room. later we realized that we had both shared the same self-narrated thought during that early ice-breaking freestyle-watching night: “wow… so this is college.”
the first time we really hung out was at the Fiery Furnaces concert, the first show—
(that’s a lie, it was The Fall of Troy, twice: once at the beat kitchen, which felt “cool” to me (now i think it’s the worst venue in chicago. the other was down in wheeling, a suburb south of town; we (a group of friends i had from the summer program the year before, one of them knew the singer from seattle. we hung out with the band afterwards, at someone else’s house. we rode in their tour van. they had a tiny tv with an xbox plugged into it. at the kid’s house everyone smoked a lot of weed (that band could really put it down) and they jammed with the guy whose house it was, and i remember someone put on jurassic park and the singer pointed with glee at the scene where sam neill shows the lil kid how easy a raptor would gut him and how his knees wobbled when he got back up. mostly i thought “wow these guys smoke so much weed.” i tried to tell the singer about the times i saw him play (a road trip to Tempe in high school), but what did he care? we took the metra home at dawn and on the way back i called some friends from high school, partly to gloat but also because i couldn’t believe it had happened. i could hear my friend who knew the singer laughing at me from the seat behind)
—i saw in Chicago, at Logan Square Auditorium. i remember the band Pit er Pat opened, and we thought they were “boring,” but i knew even then we were being unfair (and that their sound wasn’t meant for that space). this was the first of two times Eleanor Friedberger has been inexplicably rude to me. after their set, we talked to her (the artists can’t escape talking to fans at that venue), and i gathered my courage to say something. i stammered out, “that was so good, that was really, like—“ and made a “heck yeah” motion with my fist and arm —yeah”, and she said “really, like—” and made the same motion but dripping with condescension “—yeah?” and i said “yeah,” and walked away as all my friends laughed at me.
a lot of the songs on this list come from this one guy. a lot of myself comes from this guy. when i first came back to visit from college, my parents said “you sound like someone else,” and it was because i had adopted a lot of this guy’s vocal tics. there’s still bits i do unconsciously because of this guy. if you hear me say “so much, so many things” or “you gotta eaaat” or “no, go ahead,” technically they’re from either The ‘Bu or SickAnimation flash shorts, respectively, but i learned about them from this guy.
but anyways, “here comes the summer” is a perfect song that transcends whoever showed it to you. it is the summer (even if it’s coming!) and it is also after the summer. my memory is of my friend saying “yeah, this song is good, but Sweet Spots is the better song,” because now that i cast my mind back to this friendship, so much of it was transactional, but in a way meant for me to always lose. like, yes, i would come out with “more knowledge” and “a deeper understanding of either art or The Beach Boys,” but it was at the cost of my own interests, my own personality. i got subsumed into this guy for so long (that line of thought makes me wonder if it held off certain other revelations, but that’s probably unfair), i lost the ability to make my own decisions about taste, as if something wasn’t good unless this guy also thought it was good. i lived my life in search of his seal of approval for years. getting my neck out that yoke was a revelation.
“here comes the summer,” at least, was a song that was mine before it was his.
such a color, shugo tokumaru
but one reason i was so allured by this domineering friend was that so often his musical taste was really good, and i would learn about someone i just wouldn’t ever have otherwise. this song is one of them. i could have picked any song on the album it comes from, night piece, but i chose this one because i named an episode of FEELS after it.
it’s a great title. i hate to just say “it’s evocative,” because that’s only half a sentence— evocative of what, jerk— but it’s true. i love to imagine saying “oh… such a color” about something happening in my life.
(and then the memory rushes back in a huge gasp of “oh no”)
i had been instant messaging with someone from home. my ex-girlfriend, even, which felt weird, but also exciting, a tether back to home that also carried a charge of sensuality. we had a tendency to keep hooking up— we did so a couple of times before high school ended, and we’d do it again when i came home for thanksgiving break and then winter break— and the way we instant messaged felt like another arm of that then-continuing story.
but then, something else. i remember once during winter break sitting with her friends (i think she was out of the room) and someone said “you know, with everything going on with her” and i, truly dumb to it, asking “no, what” and someone said “that’s not funny” and i said “no, i seriously don’t know what you mean” and everyone realized i didn’t (that she hadn’t told me) and said “it’s bad, let’s talk later” but we never did. until one day on instant messenger basically the same interaction took place with her and me— the “what do you mean” and “that’s not funny” and “no i mean it i don’t know,” and then she told me (i remember it clearly, the pauses in her messaging, the feeling of knowing “she’s typing it out with intent here,” of knowing that she was doing two things at once: she was pacing her messages for maximum effect, and also because she needed to steel herself before telling me. she sent me this message: “my mother was raped,” and my world fell apart in sympathy to this unknowable thing becoming knowable. there was more to it than that (she was actually upset because the trial was coming up and everything was getting reopened), but that was enough for me. and, embarrassingly, it changed the relationship. i stammered (you can stammer through typing) out my sympathies and my apologies and tried to give advice (as if a baby faced 18 year old had any to give) and tried to be present in that moment— i did truly care, and it broke my heart to see someone i had truly loved going through such a thing.
but it spelled the end of the romantic part of the relationship. which was good, honestly— it wasn’t something that was healthy to keep returning to. no relationship, friendship or romantic, was healthy to keep that far into the new life that college in another city represents. i sat with the new feeling, and couldn’t put a name on it. everything felt different, but i couldn’t figure it out.
i walked over to a new friend’s dorm. she answered my knock and said “…what’s wrong?” because i have a bad poker face but also because she was a sweet and kind person who i wish i was a closer friend with today. i walked into her room and and i stammered my way through an explanation of the messages i’d just got and it came to me in that moment— “it just… it feels like… now that i know… that this has happened… it’s like… the colors are different now.” and i felt the room shift, like the colors were different there, too, and as i lay on her bed and looked up at the scarves she’d tacked to the walls and ceiling i realized that we had become longterm friends instead of just new friends who maybe were wondering if we’d get together soon or maybe not but who knows (we had been hanging out a lot, and she was cute, and different, and somehow i’d already met her mom, and her mom really liked me. i remember one day she was cutting up papers while sitting on the ground, and i was doing something on the other side of her room, and i walked over to hand her something, and for a half a second i could see down her shirt, and i wasn’t trying but i saw her perfectly flat chest and i thought “wow, that’s incredible, and so interesting” but before i could investigate why that was my exact reaction, i realized what i’d just done and felt a heavy burning shame).
i knew instantly that it was better this way, being good friends, but i still felt a pang of disappointment, like i wish i’d held off on “talking about real life” with this person, to keep it… i don’t know. it was awkward but it was nice, she gave me a bagel with tofutti on it and i’d never had that before and i liked it.
i still talk to this person, but our friendship often goes in a pattern of “we are friends and we hang out and talk a lot and it’s very nice,” and then it shifts into “but then we don’t talk for like, a year straight,” and we’re definitely in the latter one right now, and that makes me sad. i wish we were better friends (but i can tell you why we’re not— it’s because i can’t remove the feeling from myself that in another life we’d have been the perfect couple. this will not be the last time i say this about someone).
little yellow spider- devendra banhart
a trifle, but a weirdly important one. devendra banhart was a significant figure in our listening lives for less than a year, but his influence had ripples— an allowance of feeling mixed in with revelry. “freak folk” feels like a blip in hindsight, but everyone loved it then. i don’t know why it has to be “little yellow spider” on this list instead of like, “a sight to behold” or “this beard is for siobahn,” or, i don’t know, “i feel like just a child” (cripple crow coming out was what forced the friendship between me and the domineering music-taste friend; my roommate and i heard “this guy next door” has a “torrent” of it, and we ran into his room demanding to hear it. he did not let us hear it). it’s “little yellow spider” because my mom liked this one a lot, and it became one of the songs that bridged a gap between me and home.
two memories here:
one is seeing devendra banhart at logan square auditorium, the second concert i have seen at this venue. it is a good time, though i remember trying to video tape the first song on my tiny digital camera, and making the (genuine) joke to my buddies, “dang dude my arm’s getting tired,” and a woman behind me says “well, why don’t you just enjoy the concert like everyone else,” not knowing that my junior bootlegging is a bit. i spend the first six songs in a weird shame. devendra jams a lot, he plays a weird reggae version of “little yellow spider,” he brings a guy on stage and says “play a song, man,” and leads the whole band following this guy’s simple tune without words. i think to myself then, and later, “what would i have played up there?” and realize i don’t yet have a song worthy of it. is that a fire set under me? maybe. we go out for dinner after at a mexican restaurant which is somehow still there almost 20 years later. my friend orders nachos, and they bring him a plate of exactly eight chips with cheese melted over them, like, melted exactly to their shape. we laugh harder than we had since getting to school. i worry i won’t be able to afford the tacos i got.
the other memory is not even mine, it’s a story told to me years later. it was the last night before college really started. my parents had driven me up from albuquerque. we went to dinner at a restaurant down michigan avenue called MyThai. i think it’s a hot woks/cool sushi now? (acutally (i’m going to look it up) it is still a hot woks/cool sushi. i walked down google street view to find it. it was higher up michigan avenue than i remember. i guess that’s because, in this memory, i do not know what chicago’s shape is, everything is much further away than i expect it to be. so my parents and i are having dinner at this thai restaurant, the dinner goes fine, we take photos together (i just found these photos and i can see every single emotion playing over my parent’s faces and it devastates me; for the first time i can understand what they are doing, who they are saying goodbye to, the knowledge that they will never know me as well as they do in that moment ever again, the sheer cliff of this exact goodbye, putting a dark line on a page that had stretched eighteen years and nine months long. i cannot look at the photos, to do so is to swallow up my entire life into a regret that no one is asking for. i wish i didn’t do that to them. i know that i had to). dinner is fine. afterwards, we are outside, and it is time to go. their hotel is down the street. my dorm is up. we stand awkwardly, after hugging three times. my mother says, “turn around, and don’t look back. i want you to see my like this, not a blubbering mess that i’m about to be.” i say “well, okay. i love you.” my dad says “proud of you.” i walk away, i follow my mom’s instructions. if my mom wails into the air, the city swallows me up.
as i walk away, and fade into the distance made of people and cars, my mom turns to my dad and says, “so how pathetic are we going to get?” and he says, “let’s not put any limits on it.”
summer skin- death cab for cutie
writing this has immediately shown me that i have some of this out of order, chronologically. but there’s at least a vibe to follow here, so i don’t think i’ll really make too many adjustments to it. the point is, this song should be later, more of an “into 2nd semester” feeling. though it is definitely true that Plans was a huge album for a good, strong two months of first year. i found a copy on OurTunes, and later the high school ex-girlfriend sent me a burned CD of it because she had a bonus track i wanted (she had drawn hearts on it— it reminded me of when we dated and she made me a mix CD called “just a collection of randome [sic] songs”). plans, i thought, was great. “soul meets body” was a great single that had a really nice part where the acoustic guitar comes in before the second verse. it made me think about arrangement and lushness of tone in a way i hadn’t quite yet— or rather, it made me think about how i could achieve that.
but my domineering friend said out loud “death cab for cutie sucks,” and would give no ground on the subject, and so i had to stop listening to it. my parents were confused, since i’d come home for thanksgiving break and yelled excitedly about the band, and then came home for winter break and said they suck. but that was the social power this one guy had. “marching bands of manhattan” fell into the same feeling as “faking the books” did— songs for slow-motion shots of walking down brand new hallways. “marching bands” held more love in it, though, the feeling of having a crush on every person i met (early in the year it’s the girl i went on one walk with before never really seeing again. we were in a park and there was a barrier over some grass and i stepped over it, and she said “oh i don’t know if i should,” and i said, “it’s okay, here—“ and i grabbed her arm to guide her over, but i grabbed it too hard, too forcefully, and i could tell there was some strange distance after that, and i was embarrassed and didn’t say anything. we didn’t hang out after that). who else is there that i am forgetting? all of my friends, who i claimed love to other friends about. i remained alone my entire two years in the dorms.
“summer skin” is a car song, so it barely even belongs on this playlist— it belongs to my parents, after they latched onto it. it is with them i went on drives, exploring new mexico at length. “summer skin” is in that car, or it is outside in their yard, drinking the sun deep into night.
the ghost and the eyes, thanksgiving
adrien orange is a complicated guy who was fucked up but also seems to have fucked up a lot of other people’s lives. i don’t know whose right it is to tell that story; i don’t think it’s mine. but for around three years he made music as Thanksgiving and i said, without irony, “this guy’s the new Dylan.” you don’t get that feeling from “the ghost and the eyes,” but you get the other thing that was becoming important to me in college— communal listening. we went to an apartment to see thanksgiving play (i could not for the life of me tell you where it was— further out than i’d ever been before, which probably means it’s like, a block away from my house now), and he asked us to clap the rhythm of this song and sing “ooo ooo ooo ooo” so he didn’t have to. i loved that. i loved being a part of this song.
my roommate had the actual CD of the ghost and the eyes in our dorm. i was so happy to hear this song that i felt apart of, even if i wasn’t on that CD myself. music was starting to feel bigger in college, i’m not sure why, maybe it was how far i was from everything i’d ever understood. i was being bullied into giving up the things i’d loved in high school (the smashing pumpkins, the fall of troy, death cab for cutie, the blood brothers), and these new, stranger sounds came rushing in, sounds that opened my mind (this sounds like cheese, but) to feelings i didn’t think possible. everything i heard was something i’d never heard before. it was almost a better education than anything i was getting in actual class (very true, but mostly because “The First Year Program” when i started at SAIC was a mess— they hadn’t nailed down the curriculum, and no teacher knew what they were supposed to be doing). Thanksgiving, the band, was probably the first artist that started to open this new mind of mine into another train of thought: this is good, and i could do it.
leaf house, animal collective
animal collective’s “classic” run of albums (it feels mean to say that about a band that’s still around, but, well, sorry) ran concurrently with my exact time in college: Sung Tongs right before, sure, but Feels came out right as it began, and Merriweather Post Pavilion soundtracked my senior year. it was nothing less than thrilling to be “on the ground” while this band made music that it is fairly uncool to venerate these days, but had greater power than anything else from 2005-2009. that’s a quick run, but immense. this playlist could have just included the entirety of the four albums they made then. i listened to them all, in full, enough for their inclusion to count. there’s not a moment in those years that isn’t soundtrack at least in part by this band.
why “leaf house,” though? i think, again, because of the communal nature of it; children singing together and then yelling “meOW, kitties! meOW, kitties!” life was large enough to have room for something as silly as this. i appreciated the band in the initial moment for allowing this. i appreciated them for other things, later, and we’ll get there soon enough.
my first two months of freshman year were hard. i can list all these great songs, and tell you all about the great friends i had, but honestly i didn’t really have those friends until the end of the semester. at first i felt alone and insane. i took terrible care of my half of the room. trash and trinkets piled up on my bed and then started to pile away from it. the closet stretched an extra two feet out of it. for a week i slept on the futon my roommate had bought because my bed was so full of shit. my roommate hung out in the room less and less, trying to get away from my disgusting lifestyle. i felt helpless to change it, i just couldn’t get it together.
i started thinking “i should go, i should leave” i looked up other schools to transfer to, picking cities out of a hat, not really thinking it through. i had long, drunken-feeling (but not yet drunken) conversations with my dad about “am i doing the right thing” and he told me to stick it out, and i hated to hear it, even if he was right.
the work i made was garbage, partially because everyone’s work was garbage, and partially because i just didn’t know what i was going to do. no teacher was telling me what kind of work i should make (they couldn’t read my mind anyways), so i made a lot of bad work. one week i painted teeth on masonite. one week i painted “amber waves of grain,” which felt pleasing to do but i knew it wouldn’t hold up in the court of conceptual art so i stopped. i explained a video idea to one of my teachers and she told me to stay away from clichéd imagery and i felt like a huge idiot.
only twice in my first semester did i get a critique that went better than just a “well, okay.” the first was a disastrous group project (disastrous in the sense that everyone did terrible work— forcing strangers to “form a group” was a dumb idea and everyone knew it. the first day of this project, after everyone had been assigned their group, the two other people in mine left class for the day, leaving me to figure out the entire idea by myself). our project was to present a fake company; it was called Dreeb and we gave a half hour long talk about the benefits of joining Dreeb but refused to give details on what we actually did. in my mind it was based on the old ads for BASF— “we don’t make a lot of the products you buy. we make a lot of the products you buy better.” my tagline was “Dreeb— we’re in the air you breathe.” one of the kids in my group remained a no-show, but the other actually went far out of her way to give a good presentation: she handled the Q&A and saved us from disaster (the only anecdote i can remember about her was from a friend i made later, a girl who said “oh, that girl? i would hear her slobbin’ knob from her loft like every fuckin’ night.” i appreciated the gall to phrase it that way.
the other piece i was complimented on was for the “performance” section of my first year class. i asked a friend of mine, a girl with platinum blonde hair who i knew from the summer program, to slap me in the face while i murmured “stupid” over and over. i told her not to hold back. she didn’t— her last slap knocked me over and made my ears ring. “wow,” she said. “that was fun.”
i say all this like no one else made bad work. that’s definitely not true. everyone did, to a certain extent. my domineering friend was told to “make a big painting,” that was it, the only instruction. he would up painting a ten foot canvas, depicting a table tennis game between a chinese man and an american. on the top of the painting it said, in the classic wes anderson font, “1971 DIPLOMACY.” it wasn’t very well-painted, but how could it have been? no one taught him how to paint, they just said “paint.” so he didn’t know that you had to prime a canvas before painting on it: every six inches of canvas required a new tube of acrylic paint. we tried to tabulate what the cost of this giant painting would be, and couldn’t stop laughing. he gave me the painting at the end of the year, and it hung in nearly every apartment i lived in from 2007-2020.
pretty mary k (other version), elliott smith
my domineering friend and i bonded hard initially over our shared love of elliott smith; we’d talk late into the night about the smallest details of our favorite songs. it’s the texture of new friendship that i sometimes miss (i have felt it recently, i just have forgotten to make sure i remember it in the moment, to remind myself that i have worth here). i have already used this essay as a hit piece against someone who was once my best friend. it is both fair and unfair to remember the texture of what being his friend was like (i also do this when i try to remember when it was nice to love my abuser). i do it to try to remind myself that it made sense to be this person’s friend (i also do it to remind myself that it was not my fault i fell in love with an abuser).
so i try to remember the late nights in his dorm room, talking about music, talking about art, learning from each other, growing through each other. this was important to me, i am thinking, i am yelling at myself to remember—
—but does it matter anymore? he is not my friend, through a series of incidents none of which are my fault. here’s another memory, that coincided with me originally getting into elliott smith:
in high school i decided to fall in love with a girl two years younger than me. (don’t worry, one of the two awful therapists i had in high school went out of her way to tell me it was fucked up, i know, you don’t have to tell me again.) she was a poet and a playwright and an actor and she wasn’t exactly great at any of those things, but there was an air of “spirit” around her, and between that and her kinda-buck-teeth, i fell in some sort of love. i tried to hang out with her, as much as i could, because we seemed to get along, and we did, and it kept going, and everyone knew i had a crush on her, but i didn’t do anything about it, because i never do. but it was nice enough anyways. she kept inviting me to events at the theater company she volunteered at, and i became extremely tertiary in that scene, and decided i loved it, there was romance there, and all these theater kids seemed kinda cool and they smoked. then, in january of 2005, i went to an event at the theater festival put on by the company she volunteered at. i had bought tickets to the whole week-long event. she saw me during the intermission, and came up to me. as she spoke, the room around me began to blur. she was saying “this whole trailing me around this has to stop. i’ll give you until the end of the festival, but after that?” and i don’t know what else she said, but she walked away and i stood there dumbfounded. i saw another friend of ours a few feet away and looked at her with shock and i couldn’t read her face, and i stormed out of the building, then remembered i’d forgotten my coat so i stormed back in and then i stormed back out again. i wrote in my livejournal that night “bitch. what a fucking waste of money.” i had just turned 18, i’m sorry.
that summer, she saw me at a concert. she waved me over and said “hey, you” and took me outside. we sat on a bench in front of an abandoned fish and chips stand and she said “i’ve been such an ass,” and i said “well, yeah, kinda” and she said “i know, i know, but i was going through a lot” and she recapped a little bit of it, which i already knew, because i was still friends with her friends, but she still told me about the 31 year old she was in love with (she was 16), and made brief mention of another guy in the theater company, and then said, again, “i’ve just been such an ass,” and i said “okay” and she said “but do you want to give it a try? you know… us?” and i forgot all the other ridiculous things that had happened before that moment and said “oh, wow, yes.” and for at least 8 hours, i thought we were going out.
then she was never at home when i called, or she was busy when i did get her on the phone, or when i’d go to the goth café everyone hung out at, she’d find a way to immediately leave, and then one day at a theater show she was a part of that i went to with some other friends of ours, she walked by me and did not look at me once, even as i said “hello,” she just kept walking. and i didn’t know what to do anymore, it was 2005 and i was going to college soon and “forever” and what was going to happen, and i knew the answer was nothing, so i bottled up the feelings i had for her and left.
in the first weeks of freshman year the bottle broke and i remembered her and it spilled out in a ridiculous way. i found a video advertisement for the summer theater program she was in and took a screencap of every frame that had her face in it and made an animation of them. then one day, she sent me a letter, as if she had felt the disturbance of me making a disturbing imovie project out of a failed crush. i collapsed when i saw her name on it (literally, with a flourish, spilling myself onto the floor of the 3rd floor mailroom). it said she’d call me in about a week. she did. we talked for three hours, at one point i had to go out to the dorm lounge to keep my phone plugged in. at one point, she said something that i will never forget, though probably not in the way she meant me to: “the far stupidest thing i’ve ever done is not fall in love with you.”
i spent the next week laughing about that with my new dorm friends. “what does that even mean!” i said, and we’d make a guess and say “nooo” and laugh some more. it was ridiculous, and i knew it, and i realized it always had been, and i got over it, i thought.
muzzle of bees, wilco
someone in my first year class borrowed a dvd of burn to shine 2, the 2nd of two DVDs that someone (i’m sorry, i don’t know who, and it doesn’t matter) put out where a lot of bands gather in a beautiful place meant for destruction and play a song each. the 2nd of these is chicago based, and thus has the band Wilco in there. they play “muzzles of bees,” which has always been one of my favorites.
ive loved that song a long time; i had actually bought the CD it came from in Chicago the year before. but i took it back to high school and i loved it and i loved Muzzle of Bees and so did my parents. we went to see Wilco in 2005; a girl i had a crush on was at the concert, two seats away from mine. we both loved Muzzle of Bees; i loved her. i dont know how she felt about me. she’ll come up again later.
this person who borrowed the DVD watched it with me in the dorm lounge. no one was there, so we watched the performance again. then we watched it again. and again. we watched the performance six more times until someone came in and wanted to watch something else. so we went to her dorm room (which was in another building), and kept watching it, until we both fell asleep in her bed as the sun came up. i walked back to my dorm feeling warm but scared. i was too… what, dumb? young? i couldnt place the feeling. now i can, and it could have been love.
we did that another night, too, not with the DVD, but just in my bed, rolled up beneath the covers because the top lights were off and they actually put out a ton of heat and we didn’t realize that. we looked into each other’s eyes and went silent a few times but once of us would laugh and we’d keep talking and then we’d go silent again and look at each other but something didn’t happen.
we went to see wilco together, at the auditorium theater (the first time either of us had been there). we had went there to get the tickets, waiting for the box office to open (what an incredible memory: you had to be there to get the tickets, or you had to call.) it started to snow while we waited for the tickets— the first time i’d seen snow in chicago.
during the concert, we caught each other’s eyes again, and looked at each other in a familiar silence. i realized what i’d been missing all those other times— i’m supposed to kiss her. i didn’t (i wanted to, but i told myself she didn't want that, even though i can see the face she was making at me clear as day in my mind, and i can see she wanted me to kiss her), and the moment passed.
we remained friends through freshman year, but once we didn’t have any classes together, we stopped really seeing each other at all. we hung out once again, three years after college. she still texts me every now and then, always with a kind word. she’s moved to Arizona, the place everyone thinks i’m from. sometimes i remember her, and think of her huge eyes looking back at me in the dorm’s early light. then i have to stop myself from wondering what would have happened if i’d closed my eyes, and—
last year, she texted me out of the blue and said this:
“I don't think I ever told you but you were one of the only people in college who showed me friendship without asking anything in return. I remember lying on your bed listening to smashing pumpkins and feeling truly safe for the first time in awhile and honestly for awhile after that. I should have told you sooner. Thank you.”
i felt like a monster when i read it, because my memory was of “should i kiss her?” on one hand i’m more glad i didn’t, now. on the other… well, i don’t know. i wish she had told me sooner because i wish we had remained friends. i don’t regret the group of friends I wound up with but sometimes i wonder what my life would have been like if i’d gathered a different group. what if i had kept hanging out with her, what if my early memories of discovering chicago were next to her? where would i have wound up?
but i didn’t. instead i stayed in my dorm, listening to music.
banshee beat, animal collective
the reason i felt like i could end my comic FEELS early without it feeling (too) unsatisfying was that the chapter i was working on when i made the decision to end it finished on a fantastic, colossal joke. every post ended with “FEELS, by Annie McDuffie.” the last scene was two characters in their dorm at night, awash in purple city-glow and illuminated by laptop light. one was listening to music, and the other was in bed; he asks, “wow, this is incredible, what is this?” the other says, “oh it’s the new animal collective, i just got it off oink today.” “oh, wow. it’s… really beautiful. what’s the album called?” “oh, uh. it’s called…”
FEELS, by Annie McDuffie.
revealing, of course, that the comic wasn’t just a cute joke about soft-internet lingo in the mid-2010s. it was named after the animal collective album. and that scene is as torn from life as the comic ever got— that’s literally how i first heard Feels, and particularly “banshee beat,” which became a song-guide for the rest of my time in college (and honestly beyond). there isn’t a moment for a decade after this that there isn’t a new memory soundtracked with this song. it’s there walking home during winter break, feeling new but still pulled back. it’s there on hot summer chicago nights, alone in town and lonely but alive. it’s there after college, walking home late at night from whatever shitty job i have to commute to. maybe it’s time for it to come back again.
but i can still feel the power of that first year of knowing it, feeling every punch of “down to find the swimming poo-OOOOOOOL.” it felt weirdly adult, even if animal collective is kind of just warped children’s music. it felt like it was telling me secrets i didn’t know yet. it had drive but it was ambient. they played it in 2006 at logan square auditorium, and it was longer and even more hypnotic, and everyone closed their eyes in the purple light and swayed.
i like animal collective’s guitar music because even as i’ve learned how nearly any sound can be made as i’ve learned more about music, something like “banshee beat,” or most of the sounds on Feels? i still have no idea how six strings are making these sounds. i hold on to that feeling, just as i hold onto this song, still taking it on walks with me almost 20 years later.
closer, low
it’s funny that low makes it on this list here because in 2005 i literally only liked this song and no other song, but here in 2023 they’re probably my favorite band of all time. so let’s ignore the fact that they are an absolutely colossal band with a totemic discography and focus instead on just “closer.” it’s here because of the domineering friend and my’s search for the most obliviating, depressing music possible. he always had this taste for “something fucked up,” like a story wasn’t worth it unless something dies (you can see it in his work today; he even went so far as to add a new ending to a story inspired by a friend of ours where she dies in a motorcycle accident; she’d just barely survived one in real life). one of his first drawn narrative works was just a man (who looked just like him) walking in a park, then looking into his bathroom mirror and shooting himself in the head.
looking for only death in everything misses not only the point of listening to Low (or any sad music), but the point of life: death makes life richer, the end gives us something to celebrate. to spend your life dwelling on the end is to give up on the richness of the now. am i trying to convince myself of this at this very moment? of course.
we went to see Low at Logan Square Auditorium. they didn’t play “closer,” so i was disappointed (unfairly). we went with another girl my domineering friend and i sometimes hung out with in the dorms. she had enormous breasts, and all the boys in the dorms talked about her breasts. i thought she was cute, and nice, but she wore newsie caps and had more than one book about geodes and i decided that was a deal breaker. one night my domineering friend and i were watching Dancer in the Dark in the common room. it’s a sad movie, and we were both sad. the geode-loving girl came up behind us while we watched it. she asked what the movie was. we told her. she came into the common room. she sat in a chair. within five minutes she was softly blubber-crying at the screen. it was a fair reaction, but it took us out of the movie, and we never forgave her. she did the same thing during Low.
i found out later that my domineering friend had been sleeping with her. here’s the absolutely insane way i found this out. it was after the school’s halloween dance (my domineering friend went as jack white. the geode-loving girl went as janis joplin. i went as captain jack sparrow. it felt like everyone else went as leeloo from the fifth element), and another friend of ours, who turned out to be from new mexico (the only person i met in college from there), said to come to her room, there was a friend of hers from columbia there.
we walked into her room and our collective breaths caught. there, sitting on the floor, was a man painted red from head to toe, completely naked. even his penis was red. somehow he brought up the idea of playing “spin the bottle truth or dare,” and disappeared shortly thereafter.
here are some things that happened during that game of spin the bottle: we all became naked. someone shaved a square inch of hair off my leg. my domineering friend gave me a hickey on that square. everyone made out. my domineering friend had to wet his underwear and put it in a freezer. my domineering friend had to go into the bathroom and jerk off. we kept the game going while he went at it. when we heard the toilet flush we cheered. he walked out flipping us off. on the way back to our rooms he had to wear a pair of the geode-loving girls’s panties. he was complaining about the wedgie it gave him. i slept on his floor. we talked about the geode-loving girl. we talked about how her breasts didn’t look as good naked as they did when she had clothes on. “the power of the bra,” i said. i asked him what having sex with her was like (we found out they’d done it when he first took his clothes off during the game and she had said “nothing i haven’t seen before”) and he said “eh. ok.” we all threw up in the morning.
casimir pulaski day, sufjan stevens
in this moment, “casimir pulaski day” is almost a joke about the exact last paragraph. “golden rod, and the 4h stone / the things i got you / when i found out you had / cancer of the bone” is an opening salvo of “this one’s SAD” that is near parody.
but it worked in 2005, and it worked hard. everything in sufjan’s schtick did that year. in my friend group, the timing was everything— a bunch of emotional babies, arriving in illinois? and there’s an album called illinois???? come on! we bought it hook line and sinker, and we had no choice.
“casimir pulaski day” was the one song that stood out above the intense silliness of the album’s concept, and even today it’s easy to see why. it’s a character piece, a well-painted landscape of tiny scenes not quite explained but that still come together to tell a full story. it’s a good, well-written song! it’s also just… that line “when i found out you had cancer of the bone,” instead of “bone cancer,” like, i know you can’t just say “you got bone cancer,” that’s not lyrical, but there’s something about the form in this song, the formal way of talking about death, that to me, in hindsight, is ridiculous.
and yet. how many times did all of my friends sit silently in warm light listening to it? then saying “oh my god, it’s so sad, it’s so beautiful.” it’s true, it is. we weren’t wrong. was this bonding? i guess so. it’s funny to me to think of the exact tone of light falling on a sheet in the morning in 2005, in 2009. i remember accidentally (sure) putting this song after i heard a friend of mine had cancer. the song was stark then, in an october cold, thinking “what is going to happen,” and hearing the “thursday night at the bible study / we lifted our hands / and prayed above your body, but / nothing ever happens” (which i do have to give him credit for— that line cuts against all the “but he’s so religious” haters out there) and thinking “well, does something happen, though” and hoping for the best (the best happened).
so okay, it’s a joke. but maybe it’s just a good one.
willie, cat power
we went to see cat power at Park West. i think that’s the only time i ever went there, to this day. this was “before she got clean,” which in hindsight is just a terrible way to think about anyone but that’s how music and fandom worked (it still works this way, we’re just quieter about it). her dad opened (this is what someone behind us in the crowd said. i didn’t believe it then and i don’t know now) the set, and it was terrible. my friends and i didn’t want to be rude, in case it was her dad, and we made her mad and she didn’t play the show. those were the kinds of stories you heard, of her getting upset and running off stage crying. was any of it true? you didn’t have a reason to disbelieve anything in those days (some of the last days this was true).
i loved cat power. i loved being sad, and she was good at it in a way few others were. i liked “names” in high school and that song was way too dark for my friends. i went to the art house theater to see a movie called searching for the wrong-eyed jesus and “cross bones style” was in the soundtrack and i somehow knew it was cat power just from context clues and a SPIN article i’d read. i bought You Are Free at Ameoba Records on a visit to Los Angeles. it was a record that made me feel cool to be into.
in college, like so many other things, it was just another thing everyone else liked. but at least we all liked it the same way, which led us all to park west. she came out (late, i think) and only played piano, and you could, pretty much, hear a pin drop in that theater. i remember a feeling of extreme anxiety at the show, like we were going to blow it, like she really was going to leave. park west, at the time (maybe they still do, like i said, i’ve never been back), had old fashioned cash registers that you had to pull the level to open, so every time someone bought a drink there would be a colossally huge CHA CHING! sound that in any other situation would be just about the most hilarious thing, but here you could feel the crowd wince at every lever pull, feeling that this was going to be the one, the thing that sets her over the edge, and ruin it for everyone.
she did not leave the stage. she was nervous, and self-effacing, but she played the piano better than any of us realized she could and sang beautifully, and we didn’t know it, but she was singing all the songs from The Greatest before it came out— no one knew it was going to be a rollicking, soulful record. i remember her going into a chord progression that lifted me off my feet (i put them back down, i didn’t want to distract her), and when she sang the lyrics, i realized, “hey, isn’t this that 18-minute song she made a video for earlier this year?” and it was— it was “willie deadwilder,” which later became “willie,” some could say a superior version, but they’re so different as to simply be separate.
i bought the greatest back home during thanksgiving break— albuquerque still had a local record store then (sorry). my parents liked it a lot, and we all loved “willie,” and i remember, clear as this day wasn’t, the front door open because my mom had cooked something that smoked up the house a little, so we were airing out the house. i was waiting for my plane home. everyone was tense with emotion, my parents didn’t want me to leave again, and i surprised myself with my own ambivalence about it. smoke filtered out the front door, getting caught in a wedge of sun. we played “willie” on repeat, and then i had to go, and we learned that my mom can’t come to the airport with us when i leave.
how it ends, devotchka
this song is in here as a thumbprint of paint— it’s here as a smudge of memory, knowing that everyone listened to this band and everyone loved this band, but that it’s so utterly meaningless now. some of that feels like it’s a backlash to litte miss sunshine, a movie that got a boatload of hype but wasn’t actually that great. that wasn’t devotchka’s fault but also maybe we just didn’t need that kind of open-hearted sweeping wine and theater kind of music anymore.
i remember a girl who drank nineteen bottles of water for a performance piece before throwing up. later, my domineering friend got drunk with her one night. when he woke up, he told us that he had found a used condom in his bed. he had no memory of using it the night before. he told us that she’d been trying to talk to him in class, getting closer and closer to him, asking him to get drunk with her. we believed him then, and i feel like a monster to not believe him now. was he telling the truth? or did he just not want to hang out with this girl?
he told us that he was packing his bags before winter break with the intent of not returning. that the experience of maybe sleeping with that girl had solidified a feeling that he did not belong here. he told us this and we all gathered around him, doting on him, worshipping him like a god. this is why i don’t believe him, because he kept getting exactly what he wanted, and because he doesn’t talk to any of us anymore because he doesn’t need us anymore.
he told us that on his way to the airport, he had two options: either jump in front of a moving train or get on it and never come back. Chicago gave him a secret third thing: the train that pulled into the station was the Holiday Train. Santa Claus waved at him from his car, and the smell of cinnamon swelled in the station. he told us that he started dancing, waving his arms and bouncing (he showed us the dance, and i still do it to this day when i’m excited about something). he told us he got on the train, and knew he’d be coming back.
you know what should be here? death cab for cutie’s “the new year,” and here’s why:
first year of college i went home way more than i’d ever do again. part of that was homesick-shock. my high-school-best-friend and i had been making a movie about “being home.” it was called “albuquerque sucks,” but once i started editing it again in college (why wasn’t i doing my homework! or, why wasn’t i making this my homework), and looked at all the faces of people i subconsciously knew i’d never see again (i was wrong about this for a horrible reason we’ll probably get to), i changed the name of the movie to just “albuquerque.” i talked long hours on the phone with my parents about “do i even like it here? should i transfer?” but i didn’t know how to do that, even if it was the right choice (it wasn’t), so i decided to “stick it out” out of laziness as well as anything else. i went all-in on “loving albuquerque,” i tried to make it my personality in the same way as people from portland make that theirs. i failed, mostly, and wound up instead with new friends.
i went home for thanksgiving, which feels insane to do now; but that’s just money and not having as much of it talking (going somewhere… for only four days???), and i hung out with high school friends and everyone was shocked that i’d lost at least 20 pounds (my college didn’t have meal cards, and you think i taught myself how to eat? i didn’t, and i didn’t know how to spend money, either), and at one point someone said “dang, dude, what happened to you? usually you’d like, jump up on a table and pull your butt out, now you’re just so… reserved,” and i didn’t know what to say to that.
the day i got in after i said hi to my parents i immediately went to hang out in the dorm room of my ex-girlfriend and we made out under her garden state poster, and were about to have sex when our other friend called to say he was outside, so we didn’t have sex and instead went to the airport to greet another friend who was back from school, and that was basically the drive of that whole break— trying in vain to “get the band back together.”
winter break was even more like that— the ringleader of our friend group, my high-school-best-friend, did come back (we didn’t think he would. i’ll get into his story later) and so it was, actually, a weird Class of 2005 reunion, and we tried so hard to recapture it all, but every now and then we’d look at each other and know that just a little bit too much of a something was different. we’d already said goodbye, and we’d said goodbye so hard. there’s a picture i have of two of my friends, shirtless, hugging, grasping at each other, two teenage boys weeping, their trying-too-hard muscles rippling with terror at the end of something. it’s hard to come back from that, it’s hard to pretend something like that never happened.
we had a new years party at a friend’s house (the house we always had parties at, because for some reason his parents didn’t care), and it was one dozen 19 year olds drunk out of their minds (my buddies had made a beer bong, i watched my friend chug it with aplomb, as he finished, his mom walked by and said “wow, great job.”)
the night got more feral as it went on. by 10PM no man had a shirt on (two men were shirtless by 8PM, to pop each other’s back zits, their classic activity). by 1130 we had blasted “Mr. Brightside” and yelled along to it. Midnight came along and it became 2006 and someone put on “The New Year” and we all sang along (my high-school-best-friend didn’t, he didn’t know the song, because he didn’t get a “let’s get into Death Cab” kind of college experience because he’d spent the year in three different places and didn’t have time to do something chill like “get into new music” like we all did). i had a video camera with me— somewhere there’s a mini DV tape that has all of this (i just found it a week ago, it is truly wild to see; like we’re all trying to obliterate something in us, like our only goal is to remove a piece of our minds; maybe the piece that was going to miss each other. i turned the DV tape on and immediately saw my old ring-leader friend walk over to me, point a finger and ask “how drunk are you,” get unsatisfied at my answer, and force me to drink a double shot of vodka. i don’t remember having a hangover the next day, which is maybe the scariest thing of all). there’s a part where i look right into the camera to sing along with the “and i don’t feel any different” line. i haven’t watched this tape in full ever again because of the intense embarrassment i feel at even a gesture towards a memory of this moment.
by the end of the night i had snuck into my friend’s laundry room with my ex-girlfriend and we almost had sex again but didn’t have a condom so instead we hovered, crab-legged and nude, our genitals inches from each other, both shaking with the effort of not “just doing it,” which we didn’t, which was good for both of us. there kept being interruptions to us about to have sex; we tried to do it at her dad’s house, too, and a friend of his came over right before we were going to. eventually we sat in her car by my parent’s house, making out while spoon’s girls can tell played. we looked at each other while “1020 AM” played and we decided that we should stop hooking up like this. (wow, it’s 10:20 AM as I write this.)
by the other end of the night, i was sprawled out with my high-school-best-friend off in the corner. in high school, he didn’t drink, or do drugs: this was new for us, to see him wasted. during the year, hearing small missives from him, partying, it felt weird. we looked up to him as a bastion of “how we could be, if we were better.” he probably hated that; he loved leaving, mostly to get away from that.
we sat in the corner and watched this party, and he said “you know, my mom says… we’ll probably come back one or two more times… and then we’ll stop coming back every break… and then we’ll probably stop coming back at all.” and i said “what? no way, man. that’s bullshit. it’s bullshit.” and he said “…i don’t know.” i knew it was going to be true for him— his parents had moved away back in his senior year (he spent his last year of high school in an empty house at the edge of town, with only three boxes and a pantry full of the ramen that my mom had bought his older brother as a joke when he’d gone to college). he had nowhere to stay when he visited (he had everywhere to stay, as in, with any of us, but i understand (now) why that’s destabilizing and not exactly fun, and not exactly “nostalgic” for him either). after this night, i would see him three more times.
but all i said was “no way, man. that’s bullshit,” and i thought of the year before when someone threw a “goodbye high school party,” and one of the little “games” that was made for us was “write something very personal on an index card for everyone.” i hated this. i don’t remember anything i wrote to anyone else. i remember what my high-school-best-friend wrote (he was still just my regular best friend, then). he wrote: “fuck. what else is there to say?” to this day, i don’t know if anyone has ever said anything sweeter to me. no one has ever summed up a 7-year friendship any better than that.
his mom was right, though. we stopped coming back home.
chicago (adult contemporary easy listening version), sufjan stevens
when i got home from winter break, my new dorm-bound friends surprised me at the airport. it shocked me; i almost cried. we took the train back to the dorms and i got the new updates on gossip (someone had broken up with someone else, and started seeing another guy, a (worse) painter), and i thought “wait, are these my friends now?” and i was right, but i still couldn’t quite allow myself to believe it. someone had ordered a pizza and everyone was talking about the girl’s angel food cake she had made like it was the second coming of christ, and when she came into my domineering friend’s room where we’d all gathered without thinking about it, we ate the whole cake. i think it was just okay.
but by this time, the group of people i was hanging out with had solidified. so much of early freshman year was a gathering of people— to a certain extent, anything went, socially. but if i think about who i really hung out with in, say, October 2005 and compare it to April of 2006, there’s probably only one person in that diagram, and he was my roommate. so to answer the question i posed to myself on that train in January 2006, “yes, these were my friends now.” a lot of that came from proximity: it just so happened that 70% of the people i’d keep hanging out with lived either next door to me or across the hall. that’s friendship by design; there was no escaping it. even before winter break we all had a new language (like i said, my parents noticed “i talked different” when i came back for thanksgiving break), we all had a new box of jokes to keep pulling from. by april 2006, this wasn’t really new anymore; it was the lives we knew, the lives we had, that we were living.
flash forward a little bit to spring of 2006 and all my friends are looking for apartments, but i was not allowed to because my parents “didn’t think i was ready to move out of the dorms,” which i think just meant “me living in an apartment put me even further out of the realm of their understanding, and they weren’t ready to let me go that much.”one group went looking at a warehouse down the green line. they wanted to start an art space there (or that was at least the joke and the dream), but they went during winter and the pipes were frozen and the water barely ran and they decided they needed more amenities than that. instead, most people split up; two (including my roommate) went up the Red Line. two more went far west, a 20 minute walk past the logan square Blue Line stop. four of my friends found a bizarre, kind of too-nice apartment above a dental studio next to a pizza place (Naty’s #2, Chicago and Wood, great bad pizza). i felt left out, trapped in an empty dorm, left with a roommate i didn’t know in the next year (we’ll get into him later).
i felt left out because we were all truly friends now, and the decisions i was making at the time to bring myself back home, to put myself back into an old, faded friend group, were starting to feel like the wrong was. i wasn’t interested in what “this guy from high school” was up to, i wanted to know what my buddies were doing next door to me.
some of them had started dating. my domineering friend had found himself in a near-love-triangle, having a crush on one girl who was dating someone and having another crush on someone else who was single. he had even talked about it with the girl who was seeing someone, but… she was seeing someone, so he started dating the other girl. we thought it was a weird pairing, but also… it was cute that we (the royal we) were starting to date.
the pairing almost immediately strained itself. she was more a child in a lot of ways than the rest of us, some superficial (she said “mommy” and “daddy” and “go potty” instead of “mom,” “dad,” and “take a piss”), some less so (her art was pedestrian, her tastes phillistine). there were other strangenesses, like her virginity (weirdly, because i don’t actually think it’s weird now, but she was the only one, then). my domineering friend was a secret horn dog, and this led to some… friction. they still tried to do things to get around that milestone (i remember pressing our ears to the closet wall to hear him fingerbanging her; later he boasted about knowing exactly how to make her cum- i can still picture the shape of his hand, the twist of it, and the twist on his face). so we all secretly questioned the worth of the relationship, why our cool, domineering friend would go out with someone so… boring.
this sounds mean, because it is mean, because we were mean to her, and that meanness is the memory, and i’m sorry.
my domineering friend was awkward around a lot of this relationship. one time i had to socially save his skin during an excruciating dinner with he, his girlfriend, and her parents at a downtown giordano’s. we came out of that dinner with her parents alluding to “why aren’t you going out with this guy” instead (‘this guy” was supposed to mean me). i thought about it, and then stopped thinking about it.
the second semester feels like nothing to me now. the memories are barely there, like we just skipped time into the rest of school. if i strain, i remember mentally striking out names off a list of first semester friends, losing them one by one, solidifying this small but essential group. i stopped seeing the remaining friends from the summer program, i stopped seeing the girl i’d gone to wilco with. i stopped seeing the people i took a trip out to a suburban house party with, and i never saw some of them ever again. a girl from my core class tried to go out with me and i stood her up. we had gone on one date (to see Walk the Line together), and something about her scared me. sometimes i regret this, still, but i think mostly because i just kind of abandoned her and ghosted her. she also left school pretty quickly after that, and people started telling me “scary” stories about her, which i used at the time to feel better about myself. i’m sorry i stopped talking to you. it seems like you deserved better from a lot of people, not just me.
that semester became ether. i think the only story i still tell is about the first time i drank a Coke Blak. i’m not going to tell that story now, I’ve told it too often. (ah! a new memory— getting ready to go to “ArtBash,” the gallery show of all the first years’ work, and wearing a denim skirt i’d found in the lost and found. there’s a picture of me posing in it. i have read into this picture a thousand times, because i look happy and safe in it. but we didn’t name those feelings until later)
the last week after school ended, but before we left had this weird feeling, i couldn’t put my finger on it. partially it was because i was trying to do a weird adult thing. it hadn’t really hit me that this, this new thing, this “freshman year experience,” was ending. i was treating like a high school year, where it just happens again in three months (i wasn’t thinking of the journal entry i made the last day of senior year, where i said “there’s no more chances to correct the follies of last year”). the 2nd to last thing that happened to me in freshman year was writing a short story based on an animation my domineering best friend had made, and it somehow won third place in a “freshman writing contest,” and so we semi-celebrated that in a dorm floor that was already emptying out. i thought, “maybe i’ll become a writer,” and promptly forgot about this. my friends left to go to their new apartments, and I was alone again, standing in an empty dorm, trying in vain to stuff the things i wanted to keep over the summer into two plastic bins. i remember poking my head out the door and hearing nothing.
only my door was left open, the rest were empty rooms, and so their doors were shut.
the last thing to happen to me freshman year was my domineering friend walking me to the train station (i was taking an amtrak down to new orleans). he framed it this way: “hey man, do you mind if i walk with you so i can tell my girlfriend i can’t hang out with her parents until later?” and i said “yeah, sure,” because it sounded fun regardless. we walked to the train station, and we talked about his girlfriend, and we talked about what i was doing for summer, and how i was nervous about it, and we made little callbacks to the jokes we’d made along the year, and we talked about the movies that were coming out this year, and i talked about how radiohead was in the studio, and thom yorke had started playing new songs, and one of them was called “cymbal rush” and it sounded real good, and then we crossed a bridge over the river, and got to the train station.
we stopped, and i looked around, realizing where we were, and i said “oh, i guess this is it.” and we looked at each other, and both of us, at the same time, got tears in our eyes. “shit,” he said. “shit,” i said. we hugged, and he said “well, i guess i’ll uh, see you next year,” and i said “yeah, man.” and we laughed at each other, because we realized, in that moment, that we had become best friends, and that we hadn’t realized that we needed to plan for a summer without each other’s energy in it. he turned around and walked back across the bridge. i watched him for a little while and walked into the station.
this is how FEELS was going to end, by the way. with a long “camera pull” up from the bridge to show the city of Chicago, as this exact version of sufjan’s stevens “chicago” plays over the end credits. that comic was supposed to be about the story of that friendship coming together. i didn’t realize, even when i’d started drawing it, that it was already long over.
the violet hour, the clientele
i got on an amtrak down to new orleans (i was trying to live in new orleans for the summer with my high-school-best-friend), so i was spending the last weeks talking to him, trying to “find a job,” talking to my parents (who did not like the idea) with way too many of my personal belongings (i brought a guitar AND an amp because i thought i was going to JAM with my high-school-best-friend, like we were going to get the band back together), too many clothes, maybe even some of my kitchen stuff? i piled the rest of my belongings into two giant bins with my next-year-dorm’s address on them (one of them still has that address on it, i’ve been moving with it for almost 20 years now), or mailed the rest back to my parents (i’ve done that so many times; desperately mailing things to my parents house because i’ve decided i don’t want to be somewhere i’m headed. i was doing it in New York City in 2021. i was doing it from Los Angeles later that same year. i did in 2018 when… well… we’ll get there). i remember laughing and screaming while running down state street with a box too heavy for my weak frame. i barely remember anything about the train ride. it was 19 hours. i don’t know if i ate anything. i remember getting on the dining car at 7AM and taking one roll because i didn’t have any money (that was half true… i didn’t have any of my own money). maybe there just wasn’t anything to remember.
i took maybe five pictures: one of a bridge. one of a child. one of some water. one of memphis at dawn. i rolled the words around in my head, “memphis at dawn,” it felt evocative of something, it felt “adult,” a mantra i was trying to convince myself of the longer this trip went. the hurricane had just hit that last september. i didn’t know what it was going to be like going in: was i going to see cars in the trees? a huge mess? chaos and sadness? “maybe i’ll help out; volunteer somewhere,” i feebly thought to myself. the city looked “normal” to me by the time i got there, outside of the medians being covered in sand. but of course it looked normal to me: i had no part of that city, i knew nothing about it, it was a stranger and i didn’t belong there.
i got into the train station, and my high-school-best-friend and his older brother (who was also living there) met me at the station. he had a new tattoo— of the trojan horse on the cover of at the drive-in’s relationship of command. he said it was to “remind him of all the good times… you know.” (he’s since had it covered up).
i tried to write in my journal, in a pink micron pen. the ink went out half way through. i wrote a lyric about it, on a receipt from a diner the day after i got in: “i guess the traveling cost me a pen.” i wrote this as my friend and his coworker, an older-than-us mexican man (i wonder how old he was now… probably just my age as i write this; he seemed so much older), talked about the “tricks of the trade,” of how to get the most money being a waiter. they both worked at the same mexican restaurant. my high-school-best-friend’s brother did, too. i don’t know if they thought i’d work there, too. they talked about “when to ‘grat’ a table” (ie, when to add gratuity to a table of rowdy guests, they used the word like a gun: “grat ‘em, grat ‘em”), and the coworker said “you do this for a table, they’ll break that bread.” he meant “give you money.” i thought it sounded cool, “break that bread.” i used it in this context for years until this year, when someone said “what are you talking about that’s not how you use that phrase,” and i realized i’d never thought to question it.
he lived on jefferson st, close to magazine, where i’d walk to on the hotter days and get an iced coffee from a C.C.’s Coffee and look at the job postings in the paper. i read an interview the next page over with jennifer aniston, who was about to star in The Break-Up with Vince Vaughn. she said “i’d always known him for movies like A Cool, Dry Place, you know, movies that were good but that no one ever… saw.” my dad had written A Cool, Dry Place, and it was true that no one had seen it. i wanted to call my parents with every fibre of my being, but i didn’t. i walked down magazine and filled out an application to a pizza place. they looked at me like i was crazy, and maybe i was.
at my high-school-best-friend’s house there wasn’t much to do. i’d never been in a “college” kind of house. it was dirty (i’d live in dirtier), there were roaches (i’d live with rats), it was messy (i wasn’t one to talk). i slept in a screened-in deck off the side of the house. one night the other roommates (who i only met twice in a month), my friend, and i all watched Fresh Prince while smoking a lot of weed. i hadn’t smoked that much weed before in my life. i sat on a couch and thought “fuck, is this my life?” i thought again of how my friend hadn’t done any drugs in high school. i looked at him through a haze of weed, and thought “i’m not feeling judgmental.” i wasn’t, he could do whatever he wanted, i didn’t care. i just had needed someone to look up to, and in that moment i realize it wasn’t him anymore. i hated feeling that way.
there were some moments of fun: the mom of another high-school friend of ours came and we walked around the french quarter. we ate at a nice restaurant and she taught us what “real whiskey” is supposed to taste like. we walked to a park by the gulf and watched the nutrias dance on the rocks. some cops came over and told us the park was closed. that friend moved down to new orleans later in the summer; he had the exact kind of life experience i had planned on having.
we still had our conversations. our lengthy, rambling, back and forths about everything, about the state of the world, about music. in those moments, it was like no time had changed. in others, with the humidity bearing down on us, and my brain breaking from the stress of sudden seriousness, i knew it was different. we could only dance around our shared past, it was clear he didn’t really want to talk about it. he’d already started a host of different lives, it was difficult for him to go back to an earlier one.
one day he went to work and i went on a long walk (the streetcars still weren’t running). i had my black brick ipod on shuffle and hoped for the best.
“the violet hour” came on, and i started jogging to it. “so that summer came and went and i became cold” started buzzing through my head. i tried to find myself in this summer in new orleans, alone and scared. i didn’t know how to get a job. i didn’t know how to take care of myself. i was trying to be an adult, but i wasn’t. i didn’t know what to do.
i spent all summer listening to this song, bathing in the memory of realizing i was afraid, when i got back to school, i mentioned how much i loved this song to my domineering friend. he said, “oh what, that song sucks. it’s all about “missing” from that album.”
les jours tristes, yann tiersen.
my high-school-best-friend had applied and been accepted to loyola new orleans. he arrived there immediately before the hurricane hit. he told me he was in the dorms for two days before they evacuted everyone. he told me about waiting in the hotel with a hundred other scared kids and how he, at the time i was thinking “so this is college,” thought “so much for college.” most colleges in the country said “anyone at tulane or loyola can transfer here for free.” i heard that news in a bulletin from school, and i got excited. one of my friends’ boyfriend got to come to SAIC because of this— they were reunited in love, and i dreamt of my high-school-best-friend coming to chicago.
he told me he wasn’t going to. he said “i thought about it, and i know i’d have fun— we’d have fun. but it would be the same old adventures. i loved those, but i need to have some kind of new adventure.” he moved to seattle. he worked at a pizza place and had a great time. after a semester they’d cleaned up new orleans enough so that the kids could come back. he told me later, the last time i saw him in person, that he wished he’d never went back to new orleans. i wonder what would have happened if he’d stayed in seattle. would i have gone there, instead? what if i’d liked it there?
that didn’t happen. instead he was in new orleans pursuing a creative writing degree he was realizing he didn’t want, and working at a restaurant where he’d “grat ‘em” and make them break bread, and he’d smoke weed with his roommates and older brother, and then just his roommates.
his brother moved away when i was there. he didn’t say much. the last time we all hung out we were at the mexican restaurant. we ate for free, we drank for free. they gave us frozen margaritas in 24 oz styrofoam cups and said “good night.” we stumbled all the way home. i’d almost never been that drunk. i set my cup down on the bumper of a car halfway home. i had no money, i didn’t know what to do, i was miserable.
i listened to music and went on long, aimless walks where i got legitimately lost but didn’t quite care. radiohead was on tour and they were playing new songs and i would download every single new show they played off of the atease forums because these new songs sounded so good, and some of them were changing every night. my ipod was growing a playlist of the best of the new songs; i remember the sun beating down on my head as i thought “down is the new up” is going to be the best song ever. then one day, as they were playing in London, i checked the forums: a guy had posted “i hear they’ve started with videotape.” i knew what that meant— there was a snippet of the song’s lyrics on the band’s blog about a year earlier. the bootleg of that song dropped almost instantly. the song was so good, even in the terrible recording quality. i bounced around the screened-in deck with excitement, waiting for my friend to come home so i could tell him about it. he got home late, exhausted from an eight hour weekend shift waiting tables and breaking bread. he tried to seem interested, but i could tell that he both didn’t exactly care and was also just to tired to anyways.
i remember one night, walking under huge trees, lit from below by the lamps in a house’s yard. i put on a yann tiersen album. the strings flew and pulsed, and it matched my heartbeat. accordions bellowed, and it felt like where i was. the theme song to amelie came on, or at least i recognized it as that, but it had lyrics. i had watched amelie, two years too late, in the dorms a few months earlier, at the behest of my domineering friend (he had an amelie poster in his dorm room). i hated the movie, but i liked the music. i walked around and knew i was lost, and panicked a little bit. i tried to think about nice things, and thought about watching amelie. i thought about watching movies with my friends, back in the dorms, and i missed them. i found my way home by accidentally running into magazine. i hoped i took the right turn, and i did. i got back to my friend’s house. he wasn’t home from work yet. i tried to go to bed. instead i got online, and saw that someone i used to have a terrible love for, who temporarily ruined my life in a slew of youthful ways, who had said to me “the far stupidest thing i’ve ever done was not fall in love with you,” had her play selected for performance in the next month. it hurt my brain— i had to be there. i wanted to see her, now. i forgot about my friends. i don’t know why. maybe it was because the only person i could talk to was someone who remembered me then, when i loved this girl. but he wasn’t home, and what was i going to say to him, anyways? i panicked. what am i doing? my friend got home. i pretended to be asleep.
benton harbor blues, the fiery furnaces.
one day, when my friend was at work, after his brother had left, i went into my friend’s room. i stood there for a moment, feeling that way when you’re not supposed to be there (like a ghost is watching you; like you are that ghost). i saw that he had one drum case from his old set. i looked inside.
what was in there made me stop breathing. i put my heart on my chest. it was a stack of keepsakes from the girlfriend he had in high school.
(here’s a little about that: i met her first, through a class trip to france. she was a grade above us, and unfathomably cool (and beautiful, in a gayer way than anyone else in 2003 (and she was the only girl i knew at that point who’d ever kissed a girl)). we started hanging out: we bonded over bowie, over REM, over art. i fell in love with her. our friend groups joined together. my best friend talked about having a crush on her, too. i said “well i mean i don’t know.” one day, in the lunchroom, my friend came up to me, grinning like an idiot. he said “guess what, bro.” i said “what.” he said “she said yes.” i said “what?” but i knew what he meant. my ears rang, i saw white. during their relationship, he gloated about it. sometimes verbally (though he would never share anything about their love life, which we thought was “lame” then but now i realize was kind), sometimes just by making sure i could see them when they kissed. they’d kiss on my bed. they’d kiss while i was in the back seat. one time, my friend was driving me home, and passed by my house. “hey, man, you missed my house.” “i know.” “well are you gonna stop?” “i don’t know.” and then his girlfriend said “are you gonna pull over?” and he said “sure,” and did, two blocks away from my house. he turned around and said “you can get out now.” and i looked at him and knew what he meant and said “…i can just lay down back here if you want” and he said “no, you can get out now.” and i did. they dated until she moved away to college. he was devastated by it, and we got tight again. i needed him. maybe he needed me, too.)
i looked into the drum case and i reached a shaking hand in and i started looking through what was there. there were notes from her in there, drawings she’d made him. photos of them from prom. ticket stubs from movies they’d seen. mementos i was there for, and some i didn’t know about. there was a card with her name written down on it, in his scrawling handwriting, but done like he’d tried to clean it up, to make this name look nice.
then i saw the thing that broke my heart: it was a blue book, from a test we’d taken in history class. the front cover was blank. “why did he keep this,” i thought. i paged through it, it was just the test. then i turned it around. i gasped, and said “oh, no.” in the lower right corner was a drawing, that i’d done, of him and his girlfriend kissing. i had forgotten about it until that moment. he kept it. why did he keep it? why did he keep any of it? i realized i knew exactly why, of course i did, but i didn’t want to admit it to myself, for his sake or my own. i felt, in that moment, so sad for him.
then i felt the deepest shame i’d ever felt in my life. i put everything back and went back to the screened-in deck and shut my eyes and cried. i called my parents and told them how miserable i was. they said “well what are you going to do about it.” i said “i think i have to come home.” they said “well, we can make that happen for you if you get a job here and take yourself seriously when you’re back” (years later they told me that after the phone call they jumped for joy, they were so happy to get me back). i sat back in bed and cried some more. then my friend got back, and my head pounded as i told him i was leaving. he took it quietly. i felt like i betrayed him, first his brother was leaving, now i was leaving. but maybe it was good— he was trying to shed parts of his old life anyways (even if he still had that box).
i saw him twice more: once during winter break that year, and once during thanksgiving the year after (he visited Chicago, and so did my parents, and he told me later he felt like my parents wished he wasn’t there, that they could just focus on me). we talked on the phone once more, and every now and then we message on instagram. he’s married now, and he just had a baby.
here’s a part of the last conversation we had: i was back home in march, and i was looking through my own keepsakes, pieces of high school to use for some other comic i’ll maybe make some day. i found, in the 2003 issue of our high school’s literary journal, a piece my friend had written. i sent him an image of it, and he said “there is no way i’m reading this. there are some things that should stay buried. i have enough pathetic memories to torture me for the rest of my life. sometimes it’s better to forget. i trust you to read my pain and make it something beautiful.”
i said, “haha wow! you and i file ourselves way different, i’ve been stuffing my fave into the worst of my pasts my whole life lol. i promise i will do my best, i only collect it all to make something better from it.”
he said, “sometimes the worst most awkward memories pounce on me in quiet moments. i wonder why i can’t let it go. i try to use these memories as a reminder to be a better person to the people around me,” then he sent me a photo of his infant son.
i said “oh my god!” and then i said, “i was having the thought this trip, thinking of how many of my friends/peers are having children, and how much i often think “wow really?” but then i thought (and i swear this was my exact next thought), “not you though, that one makes sense, that baby is exciting,” and then i said “i think that using moments of recalled cringe are the ultimate lesson-learner, or, at their best, a reminder of how far we’ve come as people. embarrassment is good, in its tiny way.”
he said he and his son appreciate it, and that he tries to put “bad” memories in perspective.
i think about this now, and my heart breaks, like i’m back looking at his box of secret loves. i wonder… what were the “bad” memories he thinks of? is it simply everything? is it our whole lives? i wonder if he thinks about the particular way he treated me with his girlfriend in junior year. i wonder if he thinks about that relationship still. i wonder if he thinks of our old band, i wonder if he thinks our songs were good or bad. when i think of “the crazy shit” we got into in high school and laugh, does he wake up in a cold sweat?
i wonder these things because, to me, they are just memories. they are no longer bad or good. i regret plenty of things i have done, and places i have been. but i do not remember them as bad. they just are. i collect them, and i look at them.
maybe that’s okay. maybe it’s just why our friendship fell to the wayside (it didn’t end, just… faded). maybe this was the crucial difference between us. the way we catalogue our pasts, and where we put them after. i felt bad for my friend in 2006 for keeping things from his ex-girlfriend. what is the difference from what i am doing now? he does his best to erase his bad memories. i am sitting here in this very moment trying to solidify them into some sort of stone.
but i do not know if it is the memories are bad or if i am bad for keeping them.
this summer (the summer of 2024), i found myself at home with my parents, in-between moves (once again, it felt). my mom called me in to her bedroom— "your friend just messaged me, he says he's going to be in town. he doesn't know you're here, should i say we're busy or do you want to see him?" i said i'd message him myself but we should definitely have dinner together. we wound up hanging out twice, once a breakfast on our own, the second at my parents' house. the first hang out was halting but warm; we'd both grown and changed and he had developed an accent i didn't remember him having (but it had been something like 17 years since i'd seen him, did i just not remember). but it was a nice meal, and it was cut short by him having to take a call from his wife because his parents had messed up the wallpaper in his kid's bedroom (or something; it was so domestic i could barely understand it (and i don't mean that insultingly, i just mean it is so out of my realm of understanding; i've never once thought about what kind of wallpaper should go in my kid's bedroom (because i will never own a house (and i will never have a kid)))).
the dinner was nicer, looser; we both had a few beers and my friend liked catching up with my dad. after dinner we sat in the backyard, which i want to say was something we always did back in the day, but that's not true. we sat on the patio furniture and we talked; a lengthy, rambling, back and forth about everything, about the state of the world, about music. this was new, but nice; it was obvious time had passed, but we had found our groove again. the 17 years shook off our shoulders, and we found that underneath a lifetime of accrued transitions, we were the same people, and those people were always going to be friends. it started to rain at one point and we didn't even move. we let ourselves get rain-wet and kept talking. my friend left long past midnight (i haven't been up this late in a while, he laughed). as we hugged goodbye, he said "man it sucks you're moving to the other side of the country. it sucks we just met up again and now we're going farther away from each other than we've ever been." i could only agree, though i was a little speechless at him. but it was true; having swept the darkness of our past behind us, the only thought i could articulate was "i'm really going to miss my best friend." i was not bad for keeping the memories; the memories were right in front of me, walking out my parents' front door, getting into a rented car, driving into the albuquerque night.
closing, philip glass
back in 2006, i made it home, and i felt insane, and i posted about it on livejournal a lot. i thought “did i make a mistake?” and i thought “i’m a terrible friend.” and i thought about crying at night but i mostly didn’t. i watched the world cup with old friends. i watched a lot of Star Trek on Spike TV. i got a job at a cajun restaurant. i washed dishes and peeled shrimp. on a friday morning id have to peel the shrimp for the weekend: that was 10,000 shrimp, portioned into tiny, sweaty bags of 10. i came home smelling like the hot barf of the sea. one day i went in and a waitress was peeling shrimp. i said “uh, hi” and she said “well, arturo left this morning.” arturo was the senior dishwasher; he’d been there ten years. apparently he said “im finished with the shrimp,” but wasn’t; he was hiding them under buckets and dishes. they said, “uh, well, you’re not finished,” and he said, “well, im not peeling another fucking fish!” and they said “well then you’re fired.” two weeks in, and i could relate to the feeling.
my parents were happy to have me back (they had played it very cool). at the end of the first week, my parents took me to a party a friend of theirs was throwing. there was a ton of people there; more than usual at parties like these. a lot of adults were there, and a lot of them knew who i was and asked me questions about college. i answered them half-honestly and half-like i was doing a bit about success. at one point i got stuck in a conversation with another college student, an idiot who wouldn’t shut up about the Killers and as i tuned out i saw on the other side of the yard the only other people my age. two women: one was short, with long hair and a semi-punky nose ring. the other was the most beautiful woman id ever seen in my life. she had shoulder-length hair, dyed black and angular, and a massive, sharp nose with a tiny mole on the side. i didn’t think i could talk to her, she was so beautiful. but i had to: some adult ushered them over in a “hey, you’re all young you should know each other kind of way.” the annoying girl kept talking about the Killers. eventually that girl left, and the beautiful girl made a face that showed she thought the Killers girl sucked, and everyone laughed, and we all talked for at least an hour, then the beautiful girl’s mom left the party so they left too, and the beautiful girl and her friend shared a look and said “okay. we’re going to be friends. give us your number, we’re going to call you.” so i wrote it on her friend’s arm, and they left, and i thought, “maybe i made a good decision.”
we had breakfast two days later. i waited for them on the curb outside a vegan restaurant. i watched them walk up the street, and started sweating. but we had a good time, and it felt easy. we started hanging out a lot. for two weeks straight we did everything together. we went to a park i'd never been to before and a bird shat on me and we all laughed. we saw a movie called “water” and they both held my hand and the girl with the nose started rubbing her thumb on mine and her friend cried. we climber up the roof of a dentist’s office and looked at the city lights. the nose girl fell as we climbed and i didnt catch her, and we laughed and she said “smooth move, buddy.” i loved them both. that love swelled my chest, and confused me.
one afternoon we went to the shorter girl’s house, and they showed me their matching tattoos on their ribcages (a heart with baseball stitching), and i showed them the scar on my chin (from getting hit with a flag football flag). then we played “three minutes in heaven,” which i guess was just “taking turns making out with me.” one of them was more reserved about the kissing than the other. after that, we both got on the friend’s bed, me in the middle. they both kissed me as i went back and forth kissing them. then we giggled and they drove me home.
i look back at this and my eyes bug out. why did i think nothing of that moment? to tell it now is ridiculous, it seems a false boast. but it happened. more importantly, why was this my next thought, then: “i can only love one of them, i have to choose right now.” the shorter friend went out of town, and i chose the girl with the nose.
we started messaging on facebook late into the night, telling each other more and more, deeper and deeper things. it moved to silly sayings on each other's walls, and a friend i hadn’t talked to since elementary school messaged me to say “damn dude u are in with _____. i think everyone at albuquerque high had a crush on her.” i thought “wow… is that true?”
one night we were talking and started joking about sneaking out of the house. then she said “well what if you did,” and i said “what if i did?” and she said “wow what are we gonna do?” and i said “walk to the park? i don’t know?” and she said “eek i’m nervous” and i said “me too,” but five minutes later i slowly wound open my bedroom window (for some reason my parents had removed the screen while i was gone, otherwise i wouldn’t have been able to sneak out). i looked at my dog and whispered “don’t blow this for me, buddy.” she didn’t.
my heart was in my eyeballs as i slowly crept out of the house and down the street. at the corner i turned and looked ahead. a block away there was a sole orange streetlight blazing down. a figure walked into it— her. we walked for a while, went to the park by the house, talked about a lot of stuff. i looked at her face in the moonlight, it was luminous, it was translucent, it was incredible. i’d watch her nose catch streetlight out of the corner of my eye. i tried to seem charming, and i guess i did. we left the park, walked back to my house. we stopped, and said goodbye, and a moment passed. then we kissed. i was so happy. i wrote “so this is what it’s like to be happy” on my livejournal.
the next day she messaged me, saying “maybe we shouldn’t hang out when my friend’s not in town.” and i said “uh, oh, okay, sure” and she said “Come on, man, have a spine” and i said “well, i don’t see why we shouldn’t hang out,” and she said a few other things and then said, “well, i can’t speak for my friend’s situation, but i have a boyfriend.”
i was devastated like a rainforest.
this heartbreak became my life. but not at first— i would up having a summer full of attempts at love (some of them successful, in varying ways). it’s hard now to even pinpoint the moment when i went from “oh, man, that sucks” to “this is the worst thing that has ever happened to me, and i’m going to make it my personality now.” but i think it was this: by the end of the summer, my parents were friends with her parents. my mom told me that the nose girl’s mom had said “you know, if she wasn’t going out with her boyfriend, she would have gone out with your kid.” my mom looked me in the eye and said “she would have gone out with you.” and i just… what do you do with that? i, in that moment, devoted my life to wishing i lived in that other Earth, the one where she never dated “that guy,” and we were together, and… look, i don’t remember where that fantasy ended because even in the moment, i had no idea where it ended. i promise you, it wasn’t (really) sexual. i was just… there.
this same last summer of 2024, literally the day after i arrived in albuquerque, i heard a voice call my name. i turned around, and there she was. i laughed as i said "hello." we talked for a minute and she said "well, maybe i'll see you around this summer." i didn't see her around again after that; it was enough. once was a good enough joke to play on me.
let the serpent sleep, elf power.
loving that girl wasn’t a problem at first. i just didn’t really think about it too much. instead i got another “job,” this one was scanning 35 years of slides a friend of my parents had accrued over his entire life of travel. he went all over the place: bali, africa, india, and other places that weren’t marked, but looked tropical. i found a slide of a hippo yelling. i found a slide of an elephant smiling. i found a slide of a naked woman under a waterfall. i found a slide of our friend’s penis.
a couple of days a week i would walk out of the design firm i had the scanner set up in and take an aimless, ten minute walk back to my parent’s house. i would, on most days, stop by the 7/11 at the end of my block (the same 7/11 where the “astronaut who made that drive in a diaper” made the phone call claiming she was kidnapped, i was told. that’s the kind of hometown thing you lose when they get rid of payphones, i guess), and buy an arizona green tea. one day they were out, and i didn’t know what to get. i thought “okay, well, i’ll treat myself, and get a strawberry yoohoo.” it was 99 degrees that day. i walked home, drinking this milk, feeling it boil and curdle in my throat. most days i just got the tea. most days the walk home was a pleasant nothing. i would dream up little songs along the way, thinking about the girl who had said “the far stupidest thing i’ve ever done was not fall in love with you,” and imagining writing a double album about her, the two sides called “i used to love you, ____ _______” and “i still love you, ____ _______.” what a bad idea!
i wound up actually getting to go to her play, the one i'd obsessed over in new orleans, and i saw her and felt less than i thought i would, and saw all the other people around her who i also used to hang out with and liked them more. they greeted me with warmth and vigor, which i guess a lot of baby actors have. her play was terrible, a hodge podge of arthouse tics and portentous writing. it reminded me of the breakup letter she sent to a mutual friend that had the line “you need to stop letting the pain worm into your heart,” which we all (excluding her) laughed at, imagining a pain of worm and not the idea of pain as a physical manifestation worming into you.
afterwards i said hello to everyone and grabbed a plate of chips and threw some beans and guacamole on it. a girl i didn’t know came up to the group i was in. they said hello to her and then she turned to me and introduced herself. (i knew who she was, actually, because i’d seen her in this friend group’s myspace top 8s, but all i knew about her was that she did tech stuff for the theater company and was gorgeous and had a great short haircut) she put her hand out, and i realized i still had the plate of chips in my hand. i switched the plate to my other hand, but then i saw that she had switched her shaking hand. i put the plate back in the other hand, but she had already switched hers back, too. we made it on the third go, and laughed a little about it. she seems nice, i thought, on the drive home. maybe i’ll add her on myspace and maybe i’ll see her again this summer.
skylab love scene, the gifted children
reader, we dated. it was the last time i dated someone “like you used to,” (though that’s probably been replaced by a new “like you used to,” i just don’t know what it is anymore)— the late night phone call romanticism kind of “like you used to.” sharing obsessions, and life histories, and storytelling. we would hang out when our friends would, meeting at the margins of a closer-knit group. she gave me a data CD of a hundred or so albums she liked on it, and i spent my days when i was supposed to be scanning slides listening to these new songs and messaging her on myspace. this disc was how i heard Beirut for the first time, before i think even pitchfork had reviewed gulag orkestar (i’m humbly bragging for her, she would never). there were songs by the band dog traders, which i loved, which i found out later was the “drew toothpaste” guy. i think tallahassee was on the disc, meaning that i learned about the mountain goats from her, too. there were probably six albums by a band called the gifted children, a band i still almost know nothing about, but that impressed me with how prolific they were.
we went to an event at a school (it wasn’t my school, nor hers. just a school that had the space because it was still summer break). it was technically a swing dancing event, but neither of us wanted to actually do that. we went because we both had friends there, and we wanted to hang out. by this time we’d been talking for weeks.. we watched people swing dance, and walked to another room where people were line dancing. we sat on a bench outside of the dancing people and talked about more of everything, how we knew the people we both knew, how it felt impossible we’d never met before this moment. a bald woman walked by. she looked great. we both said “she looks great” at the same time. my short haired friend said “i’d like to shave my head some day.” and i said “i bet you’d look great with a shaved head,” and she said “well i can’t really do it right now, it would be in poor taste.” and i said “okay,” and we watched the dancers. “wait, why would it be in poor taste?” and she said, “oh, because my grandmother’s getting chemo right now. yup, just waiting for her to croak so i can shave my head!” and my eyes bugged out and she said “oh my god that’s so fucked up i’m so sorry” and i said “no, i actually think that’s really funny,” and we both laughed. she always seemed like she was working really hard to get words out. she had a nervous giggle that i liked a lot.
i mean, i liked everything about her. a lot of it was, sure, how gorgeous she was. wow, she was gorgeous. i don’t usually say that word about someone, but i’ll keep saying it about her. part of it was easy, surface stuff: it was 2006, and “manic pixie dream girl” was all the rage, and she kind of fit the bill, but there was something more there— a darkness that i couldn’t resist. a fucked up-feeling edge. i mean, joking about your gonna-die grandma kinda sums it up. we’d talk on the phone about The Darkness (not the band, but it was 2006 so maybe they came up, too) and it never felt like saying too much.
mostly we just traded music. or, i tried to at least. at this point i was mostly listening to The Billy Nayer Show because a teacher of mine had shown us The American Astronaut, and it was my huge obsession and i was always talking about getting an autoharp afterwards because that’s what the guy in the Billy Nayer Show plays (i soon got an autoharp).
i spent my afternoons putting the songs she’d given me onto my ipod and went on walks around albuquerque at night and stopped answering phone calls from the girl with the nose’s friend (we had hooked up a couple of times; i felt like a huge jerk (because i was)) and made my way through things like the ditty bops or a band called the lights, or the gifted children’s entire discography one by one, and then i found it. the song was “skylab love scene,” and it is, to this day, one of my favorite songs of all time. it has it all: a clouded sound, a slow build, a beautiful climax, and the most hauntingly vague lyrics of all time.
the song isn’t important. the song is beautiful. the song became my life for a summer. as an ill portent to this whole relationship, it became the theme song to this new relationship (a lyric: “we missed the signpost / you took my hand / and declared resistance was futile.” that line is a joke, sure, but it’s also the kind of line that implies someone else’s story behind it. it also doesn’t really sound happy. somehow this already made sense with this relationship).
here’s something else about this relationship: i can’t remember a lot of it. i’m trying, so hard, to pull the details out, to tell you (and me, again) what it felt like to love this person, and i can’t, and that scares me. why can i pick out the feeling of the checkered linoleum in my freshman year dorm room, but not a specific time i looked in her eyes and saw a dream of a loving future? i know it happened, i remember “i loved her,” but i do not remember how i came to that. the most i can remember is the night my parents left us alone in my house, and we tried to have sex (a nestled memory within this one: she was hairless and it frightened me), but my mother had just cleaned my room and moved the bag i kept my condoms in. i felt such an anvil of shame set itself upon me (a shame i barely understand now). we didn’t have sex that night, and it turned out we never had another opportunity to (maybe that’s what the shame was; i knew it would never happen). neither of us could drive, and there was no other opportunity. but that’s not a memory of dating, that’s a memory of being a disappointed child. but how did i lose the feeling of this love?
maybe it is in how it ended that i lost that feeling.
postcards from italy, beirut.
there was always supposed to be a timeline to the relationship. i’d been clear, somehow: hey, man, i like you a lot, but i’m going to back to school at the end of this summer. we both said it, over and over again, that the summer would be all we had. i still was worried. i talked to my domineering friend on the phone and said “yeah i started seeing this girl, and honestly it’s making me kind of nervous about coming home” and he said “damn, dude,” and told me more about the summer office job he had making flash animations for a law office.
there were certain events that kept going in the face of this. one was easy— we liked each other more than we thought. another was things that we wanted to happen but couldn’t— not just the sex, thought that weighed on at least myself. i think it was just time. it kept running out, even if those three months of summer break felt like a new lifetime to me. but there just weren’t enough days in the summer to see each other. there weren’t enough hours in the night to keep talking.
a month after we didn’t have sex it was the last night we spent together. we went to a play put on by the theater company everyone hung out by. it was a performance of neil labute’s the mercy seat. it was okay, i’d probably like it a lot more now (and if it wasn’t put on by albuquerque actors who thought highly of themselves), especially if i didn’t have this exact thought in my head: i won’t see her again after tonight, and it’s the last time i will have the chance to say “i love you.” the thought weighed heavy. our friend dropped us off at my house. it was getting late. he had to go home. i could feel his impatience as we stood outside his car, despondently hugging. that feeling of “you have to say it” thundered in me, but there was something in the way of it. as hard as i thought i had to say “i love you” there was something even harder in the way of it. i didn’t say it. we said goodbye. she called me an hour later. she was crying. she said “do we have to stop” and i said “i don’t know. yes. i don’t know. no. i. i. i love you,” and she cried and said it back and i knew i’d crossed a line i shouldn’t have crossed. i wrote something vague about goodbyes on my livejournal, and got on a plane back to chicago. a week later she wrote a comment under that post: you didn’t cry.
armchairs, andrew bird
and she’s right. i didn’t. not really because i didn’t want to; a part of me did, sure. but i went back to school, and saw my new friends again, and thought “yes, this is my life now,” and got involved in the tiny dramas of our lives, and every time she would call me i’d look at my phone and start to wince, because i knew i didn’t have time for it.
and she knew it, too, so she started to get cruel. here are some things she said, just some, out of order, because my memory of all of this is scattered, and because it still makes me sad:
-one, when she asked me “what do i want to do with my life” and i said “i don’t know, i think i do want to make music and be a singer,” and she said “that’s fucking retarded, i’ll rip your throat out.” hey, that’s not the last time someone said either of those things to me.
-two, when she said “that’s because you’re just a fat bitch.” i hung up on her that time, but sheepishly answered when she called back.
-three, when she said “i’m only calling you this much because i want you to be as miserable as i am without you.” this… isn’t the last time someone said that to me, either.
i took these things in and i made them a part of me and then i tried not to, but it was a little bit too late. i visited home for thanksgiving and she came to our house and it was very cold between us because we both knew it had to be over, and a family friend pulled me aside at one point and said “you need to be nicer to her,” and i almost killed him in that moment but only said “you don’t understand the full picture.” and at the end of the night we stole a moment in my bedroom and said “we both know this isn’t going the way it should” and that was that. i have seen her… i think twice, since 2006.
in 2022 she messaged me on instagram. she said “this is embarrassing but the reason i didn’t hang out with you when you were in Abq is because i was scared because i felt like you might have been one of the last people who actually like knew me when i was me i guess. which was a really hard things be be afraid of because i didn’t want you to feel like i was afraid of hanging out with because of who you are now so i’m sorry. i also don’t know if i was kind enough to you.”
and i said, “hey. i don’t think this is embarrassing at all. i really understand that feeling, actually! i always feel really nervous when i think i’m going to see someone from a long time ago, especially someone i knew closely (and also kind of especially from the exact time we met). i’m glad to have known you when i did. i’m glad i knew that you then. i wish we could have seen each other more since then but i’ve never held it against you- it was my weird fear as much as it was yours. i hope that wherever and whoever you’ve come to be in your life now you’re doing okay, as okay as anyone can.”
she didn’t write back.
last year i saw her in a local lawyer’s ad on television. her eyes darted back and forth as she tried to find the cue to make the “raised fists” sign everyone at the firm was making. her hair was long. i could barely tell it was her.