During the week it was easy to keep myself distracted. Work, which is usually easy, was a bit complicated this week so that kept my brain busy. I had an inordinate number of appointments that I had to juggle, mostly during work hours. Spent by sundown each day, I moved from my desk to the couch, numbing with edibles and the love of a good cat.
I’m dealing with the loss (or near-loss, or state of silent limbo) of several close relationships that screeched to halts in a matter of seven days. Smack in the middle of those seven days? My birthday, and a Wilco show where I danced at the stage for the first time in years. Something I thought I’d never do again when I busted my knees in 2017. I had a moment during this show that I will always hold as The Moment I Came Back:
By the final song, I was up, my head thrown back watching the fog machine output swirling up to the distant peak of the theater ceiling, my eyes fluttering shut, then open, panting and singing the melody to “Spiders” at Jeff Tweedy’s request, telling us to sing and clap, that no one is too cool to not clap, the air between our hands is all we have.
When I tipped my head back down to look at the stage, he was looking in my direction, feet away, grinning. I smiled back, and for a moment, the band and crowd exploding like a fragile bomb around us, I was myself again. I was myself, living my life exactly as I always wanted to live it, where I am most myself: bathed in music, body moving, connected to band, people, friends, and strangers all together in a song that extolls being alone.
This magic moment, trapped among the days that have been among the hardest in my life. There’s so much to grieve scattered around me that I don’t know where to begin. When my brain is free of work and appointments and CJ texts and cannabis, it latches onto one of the lost friendships and howls for that one at the moment. There’s no rhyme or reason. Today I cry for the relapsed addict friend. This morning, I put tears into the hand that another friend shook so he wouldn’t smell like me. Tonight, it’ll probably be for the reconnection who felt so uncomfortable with me, that he left.
That’s the one that feels the most urgent. Every few days I’ll send a text into the ether, double-checking that each word I peck is intended with kindness and not selfishness or pain that wants to be anger.
“I’m not angry, and I’m willing to talk if/when you are.”
“I hope you’re close to finding some peace. I hope you’ll let me be a part of it soon.”
“I’m going to keep holding on.”
Today, I bemoaned my situation on social media, which cranks up my self-loathing in ways I don’t need right now. One friend responds that, if someone wants to talk to you, they will, and to not let relationships be one-sided. Another DMs that she knows the people out of my life miss me. She did when she wasn’t in my life.
I don’t know which is true. Both and neither?
I’ve always had an extremely vivid inner life, partially because I was bless-cursed with an imagination that hasn’t taken a day off since the day I was born, partially to pad out the loneliness that started from being an only child and a weird kid, but just carried on longer than it probably should have.
My imaginary friends definitely hung around longer than yours.
Much of this inner life revolves around music. When I listen to songs I love, I can slip into their world and live there for four or five minutes. Or eight or ten if I hit repeat. I do that a lot. The worlds within these songs are the fictions I write. The ones that, if I took them out of my head and put them on pages, might turn into that book I’ve dreamed of publishing since Debbie Harry was my best friend and we traded lines in “Rapture.”
Last year I reconnected with my college love of The Afghan Whigs and the rock star crush I’ve always nursed for lead singer Greg Dulli. Or, my future ex-husband.
I cracked that joke to the woman I met at a bar he owns in LA last week. She responded by telling me about how she’d known him since she was 10 years old. For her 18th birthday, Greg put her on the backstage list for what might have been the biggest show he ever played—opening for Neil Young at Madison Square Garden. Backstage she grabbed Neil as he walked by, kissing him. He smiled at her and kept walking.
While I joke about future ex-husbands, I also explain to people that my love of Wilco isn’t based on some squealing rock star crush, but on a fraternal feeling I’ve had for Jeff Tweedy since he was releasing music with Uncle Tupelo. I’ve never wanted to make out with him. I’ve always wanted to sit down with him and have him tell me it’ll all be okay like a protective older brother. It’s a feeling that comes from a lot of commonalities in our early lives, geography, and mental constitution funneled through decades of listening to his words, and these magical processions of notes, harmonics, melodies, beats, tones, and sounds I don’t understand but trigger deep emotions in me.
When times are bad, as they are this week, I shy away from music for fear of associating bad times with good songs and ruining them. When I had my knee surgery, I held off on listening to new music during the first four intense months of recovery.
Kevin Morby was the first music I let in, and “Random Act of Kindness” ripped into the wall I’d built to hold back feelings I couldn’t handle while I got through the pain and frustration of healing. The song was the medicine I badly needed, articulating the miracle of human kindness I had experienced in my recovery. I listened several times a day, each time humbled to sobs.
I’m listening to the song for the first time in ages right now, and it’s not exactly tainted with a bad time. It’s a momento of how it felt to wobble forth on baby deer legs with angry Frankenstein scars, upheld and supported by the kindnesses presented to me at that time.
A few weeks later I listened to Wilco’s “Cruel Country” for the first time, but I wasn’t ready to digest it. I put it aside until I was in a place to process it. I’m just now getting there.
Of these recent broken relationships, the one that seems most urgent happened after my second Wilco concert last week. I can’t lose this person and my favorite band by association in one fell swoop. It won’t happen. It can’t.
This week’s soundtrack has been the Wilco mix I made for that person, and the band’s 2004 album, “A Ghost is Born.” It took me a bit to get into that album, too, which was released when CJ was four months old and I was beginning to lose myself in postpartum depression and panic disorder. I discovered that “Less Than You Think” sounded exactly like the inside of my head at my sickest, when panic’s cold hand entered, spreading through my belly, its liquid chrome oozing from the incision that refused to heal. Metal and ice, “It’s high-pitched and it hums,” he sang, spines and fists, a body reacting to an unknown fear, visceral and natural.
It’s how I’ve felt this week and I have clung to this aural articulation of what is happening below my skin. But I know the album is going to end not with the fading shriek of radio feedback, but with “The Late Greats” reminding me that “The best life never leaves your lungs”. It’s a line I have always grouped in with Springsteen telling me it ain’t no sin to be glad I’m alive. I’m pretty sure that’s not what Jeff had in mind when he wrote the album-closing uptempo tongue-in-cheek song about great music that never gets heard or, sometimes, created. “The best life never leaves your lungs”—it’s a warning to not leave the best of myself hidden inside.
This morning Jeff made a Substack post that included thoughts about how weird it is to consider having fans. Wondering what they want, where we came from, what we have in common. I commented:
I keep writing things to try to understand my fandom. Something in what you’ve created has touched us all. I know what those songs, those lines and notes, are. There’s too many to list, too personal to dump into a Substack comment. It’s connection between musician and listener. “A Ghost is Born” came out during a horrible time in my life. Sonically and lyrically, it sounded like my panic attacks, like the inside of my head. And I felt like maybe I wasn’t alone in what I felt. Some of us, if we make those connections, hang onto them as hard as we can. I’m in another rough transitional period and I find myself turning on “Spiders,” for memories 20 years old and as new as last week. Because whether my interpretation matches your intent doesn’t matter. What does is the shared feeling. The feeling that someone might know me, see me in the lonely unpredictability.
Connection. Everything always comes back to connection. I can’t imagine what it feels like to create something so universal yet so unique that a few million people feel connected to you. Tethers of spider silk stretched to each of us from the soul of a musician.
It seems a lot to put on one person.
That’s why I try to stay back. Close enough to drink a cocktail Greg enjoys on a barstool he might have sat on, or experience a panic attack like Jeff. Not so close that any of my humanity gets all over them, though.
This week, even as I’ve listened to music, things have been very quiet in my inner world. Everyone who lives there must be hospitalized is my guess. Or, after losing so much in my reality, I’m keeping my inner world at arm’s length to protect it from being marred by this time. Or by me.
I’d like to have a heart-to-heart about feeling both lonely and loved with my brother on a private beach in Michigan. Is that any more outlandish than wishing things were different in my reality?