Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist

by Rachel Cohn

Thom is playing a little faster than he should, so I have to catch up as she leans into this guy and rocks her head like I’m making this music for her, when if I could, I would take it all away and give her as much silence as she’s given me pain.

I try to hear her voice, try to separate that single pitch from the shouts and applause. But she’s as lost to me as she was the night I cried and she didn’t turn back to see if I was okay.

I go from chords to cords, amped to amps.

the lead singer is actually singing instead of moaning and Ramoning.

Dev launch into a fucking Green Day cover, and we’re all seven years old again and dancing like we spit out the Ritalin while Mom wasn’t looking.

“I’m going to find Randy,” Caroline decides. “Hell, no, you’re not,” Norah says, taking her arm from my shoulder and linking it around Caroline’s elbow. Which leaves us in this weird we’re off to see the Wizard pose, with Tris blocking us like the Wicked Witch of the Past.

The mosh pit will reveal all the answers. The mosh pit never lies.

I lean in and kiss her again, the same way that you run to your room and blast the music when your parents start shouting.

“Yes,” I say, because I don’t want to lie, and then “Not really,” I amend, because I don’t want to lie, and finally, “No,” because I don’t want to lie.

My pride shut me up, my hurt shut me down, and together they ganged up on my hope and let her get away.

You know the reason The Beatles made it so big?” “What?” “‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand.’ First single. Fucking brilliant. Perhaps the most fucking brilliant song ever written. Because they nailed it. That’s what everyone wants. Not 24-7 hot wet sex. Not a marriage that lasts a hundred years. Not a Porsche or a blow job or a million-dollar crib. No. They wanna hold your hand. They have such a feeling that they can’t hide.

“Where do we come up with this shit?” I ask. “I mean, where do these words all come from? I sit here on this sidewalk and they just appear to me.” “Maybe they’re always there and you just need to live enough life to get them to make sense,” Dev says.

Composure. Which, for me, means composing.

Maybe this is my way of creating the illusion of control over something I have no control over.

I remember the song I began to write, in an hour that seems like weeks ago now. Can so much really happen in a night? The song was never really over, but now I have the ending – I don’t know how I’ll phrase it, but it will involve our returning, it will take in the strange pink light and the Sunday-morning quiet. Because the song is us, and the song is her, and this time I’m going to use her name. Norah Norah Norah – no rhymes, really. Just truth.

We are the ones who take this thing called music and line it up with this thing called time. We are the ticking, we are the pulsing, we are underneath every part of this moment. And by making the moment our own, we are rendering it timeless. There is no audience. There are no instruments. There are only bodies and thoughts and murmurs and looks. It’s the concert rush to end all concert rushes, because this is what matters. When the heart races, this is what it’s racing toward.