Deep Cuts

by Holly Brickley

Instead of sleeping that night I revised my end of the conversation in my head over and over, a lifelong pastime I always rationalized as productive since the lessons could apply to future interactions, though that never seemed to happen.

Accurats anxiety rep

I could get my right hand to play okay and my left hand too, but they did not seem to work together the way nature intended, and the foot pedal required a level of concentration from me that seemed to cause my mom actual concern, like maybe I had suffered some previously undetected brain damage at birth.

I decided—people with talent—and there were people like me who could only appreciate it. But at least I had that.

I could live on the way that music made me feel, its endless unfurling of emotion and possibility, like a private magic carpet I could ride into my future.

It was just what I needed as a teenager, even though I had no trauma to speak of beyond a persistent invisibility.

I personally like to pretend the phrase “deep cut” has a totally different meaning, one that has nothing to do with anyone else’s opinion. How deep does it cut? How close to the bone? How long do you feel it?

I kissed him back as if my mouth were performing a programmed response. It was my first kiss, my first anything,

They knew she and I were close, but they didn’t know our relationship had always felt a bit stiff, like a pair of jeans you can’t wait to take off when you get home.

“Okay, yes,” I said. “Those were happy moments. But there’s a dark side to that kind of happiness. There’s a pressure. They feel like the universe saying, ‘Great job, now don’t fuck this up!’ It’s not as pure as the happiness you feel when you’re having fun.”

“This one is optimism,” I said. “Right,” Joe said. “The happiness of knowing that happiness is coming.” He glanced at me briefly, then looked down into the grass, suppressing a smile. I felt an eruption of joy in my chest spreading outward so fast it made me dizzy.

He sent out a long stream of smoke, still nodding, and held the cigarette up to share. I took it for the intimacy, for the moment when my fingers ran up along the backs of his.

Living in New York made you feel heavy and lonely but full of promise, like listening to those songs.

I missed Joe. It always came like this, a hard stab, dissipating slowly.

angle. I liked New York, I remember deciding in that moment. I liked working at home, then slipping out anonymously into a loud, churning world. It was just two different flavors of aloneness, but they complemented each other: when I had maxed out on solitude, the city made me feel observed and alive.

“Your music is like an old friend,” he said, opening up a jewel box.

She stood up from the deep chair and I noticed she straightened her legs a bit slowly. How awful, to get old. As if it wasn’t bad enough being young.

Why do we listen to those voices, calling from just outside our door, that tell us to reject contentment in search of something more?

To me it was about how it feels when you’ve lost someone, and the one person you want to talk to about it—the one person who could help you grieve—is the person you’ve lost.

I clicked my pen back on. “Candidate has an enjoyable way of inhabiting space: slightly awkward without being self-conscious.” He laughed. “Candidate is awkward but doesn’t know it, basically?” “Right. And is therefore not, in fact, awkward.”

This didn’t shrink my jealousy, but it gave it a different shape. He was a complicated shadow on her life too, a heartless waste of precious time. I felt an obscure kinship with her, even as I hated how grown-up their relationship suddenly seemed, how weighty and real their problems.