Deep Cuts

by Holly Brickley

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 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.

My job search has ended in success; for more details see “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” by the Smiths.

I loved that the lyrics, for those who listened, were about the impossibility of love, the inevitability of heartbreak—but just fucking dancing in the face of it.

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

But at night in my small bed, his absence seemed to pool around me, outside of thought or reason.

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.

More have whined about being loved, but these dudes understood it’s the giving—the love you make—that matters more. Because where do you put the love you make, if you’re all alone? You don’t give it to yourself, in my experience. You take it out with the trash every day until it slowly stops regenerating inside you, and friends, let me tell you, that is no damn way to live.

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.

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.

“I want to suffer you.”