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.

It’s just that authenticity seems to me only one metric by which to judge music, and I don’t see why it should swallow all the other ones, including beauty and fun.

It takes privilege to think something’s cheesy.”

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

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.

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

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.

The senses are pure experience, I decided; there is no sense for how things seem, which is what matters to the superficial.

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

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

I described how it felt to be on a packed dance floor screaming along to “Mis-Shapes”—wailing, I said, like a lost animal who’d found its family—while realizing the loneliness that has characterized your life so far may in fact be optional.

oeuvre.”

sequitur

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

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.

When Panda Bear sang about courage, he meant the 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.

No need to be weird anymore; we’re too old, and the world is too fragile.