now the music means something else. i still think of you sometimes. it’s not like you’ve disappeared. it’s all there somewhere. deep.
but, also, i’ve got fresh things to hear. there’s a new perspective. i make new associations.
goodbye.
i’ve missed you.
i sent you the latest winter gloves album.
you told me that you had a dance party while you took your laces out of your roller skates and put them in your boots.
i wanted you so hard.
goddammit i miss you.
the new pornographers were unscathed by our relationship.
i had a high-volume dance party to celebrate.
we got in a fight on canada day. i’d been feeling upset because i felt you’d been taking advantage of me. i felt like you only contacted me to ask me for things or to do things for you. i felt like you didn’t care about me anymore.
you didn’t even want to make plans with me on canada day. i had the day off and was hoping we could spend time downtown and catch the fireworks. you were pretty disinterested.
we ended up being downtown together anyway. we had dinner with friends. on the way back downtown i reached out for your hand and you dramatically swung it away from me. i almost told you to go fuck yourself. it was pretty embarrassing to have your partner do something so ridiculous in public like that. the amount of rejection i was feeling from you was pretty unreal. you said your hand hurt from some bad hangnails. i didn’t really understand why it was necessary to flail around about it.
we went to my house in the evening and finished a movie. afterwards i read a chapter from a chuck klosterman book to you and we sat in the living room in silence. you said something like “we should talk about the fight we had last night, it doesn’t seem like you’re feeling comfortable”. there was so much tension between us.
we started talking. i got emotional. you were fed up with me. i couldn’t say it, but i was fed up with you telling me what i was doing wrong all the time. i just wanted some affection. you didn’t seem too interested. why couldn’t you just be nice to me? i was so hurt and confused.
we were supposed to go camping with friends that weekend. you told me you weren’t coming. you told me to have fun. you said you were still my girlfriend but i had to get my shit together.
while i was away on the weekend i started to realize that our power balance was totally fucked up. you held all the cards. i felt like i knew how to get some of that back. it would take time and honesty. it would be hard but it would be worth it.
it was pouring rain on the morning after i got back from camping. i had the day off. you emailed me to say we should get together later that day. your wording was suspicious and there was no subject in your email. i knew it was bad. i emailed you to say that i’d be home all day. you wrote that you’d be over really soon. you never would have biked to my house in the rain for anything other than bad news. i tried to talk myself out of thinking that’s what would happen.
i put on bon iver, curled up with a book, and waited for you.
you came in. you sat at the foot of my bed. i told you a little bit about the weekend. i asked you how you were doing. you started to cry. i asked if you were there for the reason i thought you were. you nodded. you were crying harder. i asked you if you thought this was it. you nodded. you were weeping. i hugged you. i cried out. you stood up and said you had to go. you told me that i was awesome. you ran down the stairs. i followed you in my boxers and a t-shirt. i stood in the front door and watched you pedal your bike away in the pouring rain.
you looked back at me in my boxers and laughed.
“i can’t believe we broke up to bon iver,” you said a day or two later.
it would take weeks for you to realize you couldn’t control the distance between us enough to fix things. it would take me even more weeks to realize you weren’t coming back to me. and it took weeks more for us to get to the point where we didn’t want to talk to each other anymore.
well, we do. we just can’t.
we only hurt one another now.
We shot a video to this one. It was sexy and beautiful. You moaned and winced. You could hear bon iver in the background.
I asked you in an accidental batman voice if you were “ready to be fucked”. You smiled.
The video stopped.
our relationship is/was framed by dreams of you. the night before we went to a show together – when i knew i had feelings for you – i had a dream about you. it was a pretty sexy dream. we lived it out. plenty.
sometimes in the night i feel your breathing and i want to eat your light… for you to be inside me
in the days after our breakup i still dream about you. almost every night.
i can’t see your face in the dreams anymore, though. you’re always going the other way.
i hope that means they’ve almost stopped.
i was on a long bike ride when rilo kiley‘s “go ahead” popped on my headphones. we’d already said goodbye to each other probably twenty times. maybe one of those times was beautiful and appropriate but it was so much like us to push our luck.
or if you want to find somebody else that’s better, go ahead
i thought of you the whole time the song was on. i wanted to be better to you during the breakup. i didn’t really hate you for anything. mostly i hated myself for fucking up. i’d never had my heart broken like this before. it was all new. i tried so many things that ended up hurting you. really, i wanted to be able to say, “it didn’t work out” to people and believe it was more than reflections of my own issues (even if i knew it was both of us). i wanted to say that i would be ok with you dating someone else, even though we related to one another that we couldn’t imagine being with anyone but each other.
if you want to hold on to the first girl that you meet, or if you want to settle down and plant roses at my feet, go ahead… i wish you would… go ahead
i wanted to keep the door open. i wanted you to know that i’d be there if you changed your mind. that was pretty unhealthy. i don’t feel the same anymore. you said to me, “when i call you months from now, you’re going to feel really good about turning me down.” and, it’s like you somehow knew that you’d hit that point? i suspect it’ll be a long time.
if you want to have your cake and eat it too, and if you wanna have other people watch you while you eat it, go ahead… be my guest… go ahead
one night you were lonely and you called me. you said you were out with people and felt lonely even in the group. you missed me. i asked if you were out with a boy. you said no. i felt like you needed me and told you that i was still in love with you. i told you all these things i loved about you that i’d never get to feel again. you said, “do you know how hard it is to listen to someone who loves you this much?”
i didn’t. how could i?
by the end of the call you’d admitted that you were out with a boy you thought you had feelings for but he didn’t seem interested in you. you felt super rejected. i felt lied to. i felt like you wanted the support you knew i’d give you without having to tell me why, and it wasn’t until i started telling you that i was still in love with you that you wanted me to know why you were calling. i guess you thought it would change my mind.
it did. but in a pretty shitty way.
i got mad. you got even.
if you want better things, i want you to have them.
i still don’t hate you. there’s still a lot of love in my heart. i want you to be happy. but i’m sad about how we ended. i guess we never get the ending we want. or, even when we do, we find a way to fuck that up too.
i don’t remember who you thought “no scrubs” was by, but i definitely remember thinking that no self-respecting feminist should forget that it was a tlc jam. and then there was that time you thought a song was by whitney houston when i knew for a fact it was by toni braxton.
we were so close to each other in these small moments.
but c’mon, really?
step up your game.
i went to the gym you worked at. at first for you, but then for me. i hated the music there, but i listened to a lot of it while talking to you at the front desk. associating shitty club jams with you is one of the worst legacies the gym would impart on our relationship.
visiting you at work was a mistake. i’d watch boys hit on you and watch you laugh and smile. it almost always made me jealous because, whether or not you knew it, you had a flirty personality. there were a lot of days where it felt like you paid more attention to the regular clients at the gym than you did to me, especially near the end. sometimes you’d even tell me all about how people checked you out or hit on you.
i told you that you were beautiful all the time, but eventually felt like it wasn’t me you wanted to hear it from.
i would talk to you for a little while before leaving and you’d maybe be receptive. you’d say goodbye cheerily to everyone who left and personally greet everyone who came in. sometimes we’d be talking and you’d see someone come in and start chatting with them and completely ignore me. i’d walk out. i wouldn’t get a cheery goodbye.
eventually, i got frustrated that you sometimes treated me worse than the average customer. i should have stopped coming sooner. i should have understood that you seeing me that many times a week was filling your quota of me while i was getting nothing in return. it was like we saw each other all the time but not really. i got frustrated that it was summer and i never got to see your gorgeous body framed by a dress. i knew you were wearing them, but all i ever saw you in was your gym uniform.
you stayed over after your shifts because my house was closer to work. on weekends you didn’t work, you stayed home because you wanted space. i brought you things at work all the time. eventually i felt more like an errand boy than someone you wanted to see.
i was too nice to you.
“down by the water” turned up on the rotation not long before we broke up. i was happy to hear a band i didn’t hate through the gym speakers. but club jams… shitty club jams… do little but remind me of that place and how, for about a month, it was where i saw you the most.
it wasn’t always that bad there. as strange as it sounds, we had some beautiful moments in that gym lobby. but i’ll always remember it as a place where i got to watch you slip away from me gradually.
we laid together in your bed. or my bed. we were tired from staying up late and talking to each other about everything. anything. we probably fooled around. we were probably about to fool around. you said “i love just listening to you talk”, which worked out because i love to talk.
we’d “double spoon”. you once told me that you were great at big spoon, but after the first time i held you we knew how it would usually go. “double spoon” was when i’d reach one hand under your neck and around your chest, and the other hand over your chest the other way, reaching each hand on your breasts and pulling you tight.
you always let out a comfortable moan when we double spooned. and, often, we fell asleep this way. sometimes in mid-conversation.
julie sang us to sleep.
we were curled up with each other in the church. the festival brought us both a beautiful songwriters circle and a reverb-filled evening in the balcony. we listened to friends and inspirations sing their songs to the receptive room. your legs were crossed up over mine. we were hopelessly in love with one another. we watched snailhouse sing the smartest songs of the group. you smiled at me and rested your head on my shoulder.
remember your enemies, they were your friends before they let you down…
in the evening you were tired and had a headache. i rubbed your temples while you leaned against me on the balcony. i held you close while you didn’t feel well. you were still happy. you were beautiful.
you went home on the bus that night. i was hoping you’d come over but i knew you were tired.
you said you want to be alone, well, look at you now…
then again, i was always hoping you’d come over.
i rode my bike around the town’s trail system somewhere during our summer-long breakup (i guess it was important for me to learn that relationships should be ended in the way one takes of band-aids). i’d been looking for inspiration in music, finally, after avoiding everything in my collection.
the hardest thing about this love is that you’re never coming back
the rural alberta advantage wrote a whole album about the end of something. it’s the first place i went. i rode the trails with my headphones in, singing along at the top of my lungs.
hold on lover. you’ll find another, but, i won’t need you and i won’t need to.
it took me a while to feel like i didn’t need you.
i don’t want to anymore.
this was a big one. if there was a song that i called ours, it was this. neko case‘s powerful tornado tearing “across three counties” to be with the one it loved said so much about how i felt about you.
my love, i am the speed of sound…
there’s no individual event that this song reminds me of. it reminds me of the very best of us: of walks where you pressed against me in the cold, of seeing you smile first thing in the morning, of having to turn music up too loud so my roommates couldn’t hear how loud we were, of the face you made in the car when you were driving away from me (with your hand out towards me, clawing in my direction), of the way you yelled your cat’s name when you heard her meow downstairs, of the way you always managed to make me laugh no matter how intense a situation was, of how you said “oh yeeeaaahh?” when i gave you a compliment, of how you said “hullo”, of the way you talked that you told me no one had ever heard before… everything. all of it. everything great.
i loved this song before we’d even met each other. but i applied it to us. i told you so many times…
this tornado loves you
it was the night before my birthday. my ex was moving out of my apartment the next day, and because of everything i was going through you’d been keeping your distance from me.
i went out to my favorite bar that night to see some bands i loved. as close to christmas as it was, people i knew were everywhere. i had some drinks and felt really happy. happier than i’d felt in a long time.
i came home to an email from you. you were wishing me happy birthday. you sent me a ridiculous image and a link to this cat power song. you told me that i was The Greatest. i listened to it at least five times before climbing on to the air mattress that i more or less associate with the beginning of us.
even if you weren’t there, i knew you were there.
