Miscellanea

i watched my suicide: director's cut recently and there was a line that immediately made me reminisce about a particular period of my life: "if you want to kill yourself, kill the part of yourself you don't like."

i don't think i would have known how to describe what i was doing at the time, but in retrospect that is more or less what happened. i was going through a bad breakup, although i barely remember that period as a breakup anymore. i don't think i particularly missed the person... i moreso missed myself, given that i realized how little of myself i recognized and liked by the end of it.

i had been trying to get better before i met them. i was already attempting to pull myself out of a depression, and the relationship made me insecure enough that i lost some of that progress. when it ended, the task in front of me wasn't really getting over another person. it was figuring out how to unhate myself again. unfortunately this required spending an enormous amount of time with the person i hated... ME!!!!

i started remaking myself, although not in any particularly organized fashion. for a while i stopped sleeping in my bedroom because it felt haunted. not literally. it had simply accumulated too much evidence of me being miserable. i associated the room with lying in bed depressed so completely that eventually entering it seemed to reproduce the feeling. i slept on the couch and sometimes in my mom's bed instead. i stayed awake for most of the night because i couldn't sleep. at some point my mom remarked that i wasn't crying as much anymore. she didn't know about the breakup because i had never actually told her. apparently the improvement was visible before i really understood that it was happening.

one night i was lying on the couch listening to an enormous spotify playlist made by a stranger online named maxwell kass. i vaguely knew who he was, but only in the strange peripheral way you can know somebody online: enough that his name meant something to me, not enough that there was any sensible reason for him to become important to my life. he had playlists that were hundreds of hours long, and i would put them on shuffle without knowing what i was going to hear.

somewhere inside more than 300 hours of somebody else's music, "air supply" by sweet trip came on. there was no deliberate act of discovery; i wasn't searching for an album that would explain my life to me. i wasn't even searching for sweet trip. the song had been sitting somewhere inside a stranger's enormous playlist until shuffle produced the correct accident.

then i listened to you will never know why, and it became inseparable from the rest of that period.

"air supply" still feels like the center of it for me. there is something about the longing in it that feels sincere without becoming theatrical. its desire for closeness is accompanied by the knowledge that closeness is unstable, and that tension appears throughout the album. sweetness never seems entirely secure. affection and uncertainty are allowed to occupy the same place; intimacy does not abolish distance. somehow there is an almost impossible brightness running through all of it anyway.

i think i needed that brightness. pain has an irritating ability to make itself seem profound merely because it hurts. misery repeats itself and still demands to be treated as revelation. happiness is stranger. happiness requires the world to become interesting again. there were nights then when nothing in my life had been solved and i nevertheless wanted to hear another song, drive another mile, wait another hour for the sun to come up. wanting anything from the next hour felt new. the album did not make me feel cured or wise or even particularly stable. it made me want things again. MORE SONG MORE ROAD MORE MORNING!!!! >_<

because i was awake most of the night anyway, i started going on drives. sometimes i would drive nearly to the airport without taking the highway, following surface streets for an unnecessarily long time while almost everyone else was asleep. i didn't particularly want to arrive anywhere. i wanted the drive to continue. eventually the black outside the windows would become blue and then morning would begin without asking whether i was finished with the night. my mom was an early bird, so if i stayed awake long enough i could meet her there. my night and her morning overlapped for a little while and we could hang out. i loved those hours. i wanted to stay inside them for as long as possible.

i found a lot of japanese breakfast around then too ("the woman that loves you!”), which i would also come to associate with that period of my life. music sometimes stops functioning as a record of a period and becomes one of the materials from which the period is made. i can't separate those songs from empty roads around my hometown, the couch at four in the morning, my mom waking up, or staying awake long enough to watch the sunrise. remove the music and the memory is not merely quieter; it is a different memory.

eventually i decided the bedroom itself had to go. there was a storage room in the house, so i switched them. i moved everything being stored there into my old bedroom and turned the storage room into mine. the new room was better… it had built-in shelves, which i loved, but the most significant matter was that it had no history. nothing had happened to me there yet. i believe that there is an enormous luxury in a room that has never seen you cry.

the physical rearrangement became part of a larger one. i started wearing my hair differently. i changed how i dressed. i spent more time with my friends. even my personality seemed to change. people around me noticed that i was doing better. after a while i felt almost like an entirely different person, which is perhaps an alarming thing to say about recovery but was nevertheless true.

i don't think self-destruction and self-reinvention are necessarily the same thing, which is why i like the line from my suicide but don't take it literally. there are parts of ourselves that need patience rather than elimination, and there are parts we condemn simply because they are in pain. still, there are arrangements of a life that eventually become unlivable. sometimes something unbearable happens and afterward, among the wreckage, you discover that you have finally been given permission to change things you should have changed long ago. apparently, for me, this involved changing everything down to which room in the house i slept in.

you will never know why always brings me back to that version of my hometown. the memory is bittersweet because i know intellectually that i was doing badly, but the images i retained are beautiful: empty roads, sunrises, my mom being awake when i came home, my friends noticing i was happier before i fully noticed it myself, built-in shelves, finding a song by accident in the middle of a stranger's impossibly long playlist. this is the annoying thing about memory. suffering does not preserve itself exclusively as suffering. sometimes a terrible period of your life contains a beautiful morning and you are stuck loving the morning forever.

music preserves a self that no longer exists with an accuracy that ordinary remembering sometimes cannot manage. i am not the person who first heard "air supply" on that couch anymore, but the first few seconds can still return the dimensions of her world to me. i remember what mattered to her, what the roads looked like, the peculiar loneliness of being awake while almost everybody else was asleep, and the enormous tenderness i felt toward anything that made me want to remain awake a little longer. for a few minutes i can almost remember what it was like not to know what happened next.

you will never know why became part of my soul because it attached itself to a period when i was learning to desire my own life again. not life in the abstract. i mean stupid, particular life: another song i hadn't heard, another road i hadn't finished driving, my mom waking up, a room with built-in shelves, my friends, morning, whatever came next. i had spent so long wanting to escape myself that wanting more of my own life felt almost obscene. MORE PLEASE!!!! i wanted to see what else could happen to me.

i haven't been doing so hot recently. maybe seeing my suicide and remembering that line made me return to all of this because i needed the memory for reasons other than nostalgia. i don't want to reproduce that period; i don't even want to become that person again. i want what she wanted. another song, another morning, another version of the room. i want to recover the appetite she developed for finding out what happened next without having to destroy my life first. (god please let me learn one thing the easy way maybe.......)

all we can do is try our best.

it's kind of a funny story by ned vizzini helped me think about this too, but honestly it needs its own post at some point.

not today.

that's all.

listen: you will never know why — sweet trip