Deep Cuts

by Holly Brickley

music was a collector’s habit to those guys, a sprawl of knowledge more than a well of joy.

“I don’t hang out with musicians.” “And why is that?” he asked with a laugh, walking backward toward the door. Because they make me unbearably jealous. “Because they always disappoint me,” I said, which was also true.

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.

“I have no talent, just opinions about people who do.”

I had this dreamlike feeling of nearing some place I’d been looking for—a vacancy just my shape, hidden inside an enormous puzzle.

There were people who could make something like “Surf’s Up,” I decided—people with talent—and there were people like me who could only appreciate it. But at least I had that. I could appreciate “Surf’s Up” so hard. 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.

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?

before I knew it my hip-hop confession had come tumbling out of me: I didn’t get it, I needed melody, I was too distracted by liberal guilt to enjoy the parts of it I did like.

I hadn’t been able to define that wiry, intense easiness. It was not naïve chill, not people-pleasing chill—it was Your Mom Could Die Chill.

“I think songs gave me a window into a magical life,” I said. “Something bigger, or whatever, waiting out there. And I felt like the only way to get there was through the songs. Like the songs, if I listened hard enough, would show me how to get it right.”

I am not a mosher, never been a mosher, my boobs are too big.

play it loud, pogoing on your childhood bed until your hair is filled with popcorn ceiling, please.

It takes privilege to think something’s cheesy.”

They were soulful and comfortable and had all the amenities that actually make people happy, like porches and window seats, and none of the things we believed to make us happy, like open-floor plans and living rooms optimized for Super Bowl viewing. They were built for reading and close conversation. Berkeley felt like a glitch in the modern machine, back then, an alternate universe for the chosen few. Maybe this is how everyone feels about their college towns.

“Honestly I think happiness and fun are kinda the same thing, at this point in my life.” Joe looked betrayed. “How can you say that?” “Because having fun is new to me. You guys couldn’t understand, you’ve been having fun your whole lives.”

That’s why the song was so short, I decided—because connection, like memories, came in the briefest of flashes.

I saw it clearly, finally, a Venn diagram diverging in my head. He needed me to be his critic. But a critic will never be girlfriend material.

starting over, alone again; there were days I didn’t use my vocal cords. But now I could see the beauty in that.

I found it deeply disappointing even as I related to an awful seed of truth inside it: that all my attempts to grow, to find creative independence and purpose, were at least partly in service of becoming more lovable.

and the idea of ever having money for nice things was as irretrievably lost to us as our innocence.

But what inspires this particular compliment, this feeling of not just loving a song, or any work of art, but longing to have created it yourself? It happens when you identify so intensely with the work it feels somehow wrong—sad, almost—that it didn’t come from your own brain. Like if you had arrived at this expression yourself, you would have more effectively metastasized the emotions that made you love the song so

The is how it was to talk to Mom: like one of those old-fashioned dances where your partner steps back whenever you step forward, choreographed to maintain distance.

What did this say about our culture, that we had invented only one word for all these feelings? If we truly valued it we would label it more precisely, like Eskimos and snow.

“Boys are less afraid of being wrong,” I said. It was a line from My So-Called Life—she wouldn’t remember, though we’d watched that episode together in high school: the sensitive redhead observing the boys in her classroom as they shouted dumb guesses at the teacher. This was why men got to run the world, even as it became slowly obvious they were terrible at it. But who was molding all these chickenshit daughters?

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

patience. I considered dropping out of the writing program—staying put, paying off my debts, finding some stern midwestern therapist to fix my brain. In the end, it was the sunk-cost fallacy that got me on the bus back to Manhattan. I was in thirty grand deep at Columbia; the least I could get for it was a degree.

My own past was indecipherable to me, like some invisible forearm had smeared the ink before it finished drying.

can hear the droney music pounding in my ears, I can feel the terror, the shock of it, like those first seconds of an earthquake when you just sit there thinking, “Is this really happening?” and then it ends and you realize you didn’t do all the things you’d planned to do in the event of an earthquake.

She’d made quick work of two fundamental truths about hipsters: that they had all been miserable kids, the boys too sensitive and the girls too willful for the social systems of the late twentieth century; and that nobody wanted to admit they were one of them.

I loved this city, its weirdos finally beating out its bimbos.

I wrote that it had taken a decade-old record to help us figure out what we wanted, and what we wanted was fun—real fun, which requires freedom, and belonging,

Was it okay to love someone this much who was not actually your partner? Was this why she wanted a boyfriend for me, because she couldn’t bear the burden alone?

Honestly, how many different ways is it even possible for the same two people to break each other’s hearts?”

but I found myself longing for a swampy Miami cab ride or a bracing winter walk through Manhattan, anything to shock my system and mark the time.

opposite of how the shiny-faced man would define the word. He meant being softer inside. He meant remembering to have a good time—to resist the lockstep, percussive world that pulsed behind his singing. To resist the percussive world that maybe pulsed inside yourself.

It was hard to know what kind of greeting would be appropriate for a history like ours.

“I want to suffer you.”