Deep Cuts

by Holly Brickley

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

“It sounded more awkward than staying here sounded lonely.”

I listened to that ‘Total Hate’ song and it made me throw up in my mouth.” “That’s cool,” I said. “Do you think that’s because you have no taste, or…?” Joe whooped. “Or maybe because that song is fun, and you take yourself too seriously?”

Lmfao

She rolled her eyes. “Come on,” she said. “You’re his musical soulmate, and you’re cute. Dudes aren’t that complicated.”

They didn’t know they were the best friends I’d ever had. How can you tell that to people you’ve known only a few months without sounding pathetic?

“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.

a song never made the narrator happy until he danced to it with her, and now when he hears it, much later, it makes him lonely.

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

I wondered if that was what made us feel so close sometimes. If the weirder the divide, the sweeter it was to cross.

“The song makes you feel the way she wishes you’d make yourself feel.”

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.

She’s writing about people, really, how people use music to get clarity on themselves.

She clucked her tongue. It rang an unpleasantly familiar bell, like when she’d discover I’d cleaned my room by shoving everything under the bed.

Same

How awful, to get old. As if it wasn’t bad enough being young. At least our knees responded to our commands.

Fuck off. I wish you well.

What a mood

This was why men got to run the world, even as it became slowly obvious they were terrible at it.

I tried to cry but the misery had become too flat inside me, too normal.

SHAME ON HIM, NOT YOU. Don’t you dare feel shame about any part of this horrible thing he did to you, including your own stupid shame.

Just forgive yourself, it’s too exhausting not to.

It’s a miracle just to be here, the song seemed to say, on this side of the blue. Don’t torture yourself trying to understand why. Know what you know. Do what you have to do.

Because where do you put the love you make, if you’re all alone? You don’t give it to yourself, in my experience.

Is this hold you have on me, Joan asked her lover, because of you—because of your power, your magnetism, the force of you? Or is it because of my own weakness?

Oof 🥲

She wants him as her deep cut, a B-side unearthed from a rarities bin, proof of her own specialness because she’s the one who discovered it, because she doesn’t know how to sing her own damn song.

“I start with the knock on the door,” he said. “I start with your hand on my shoulder.”

Love