Sometimes I joke that I’ll listen to any music, no matter how hokey or cheesy, as long as the lyrics aren’t sung in English. This is in fact mostly true. Right now I’m listening to Juanes. Juanes is a huge rock (okay, pop too) star from Colombia. The kind of huge rock star from Colombia who has won many Latin Grammies and who does a duet with Nelly Furtado. But it’s in Spanish! In Spanish, okay? That song is playing right this second, as I type. It’s called Fotografía. If the only song you know by Nelly Furtado is her major English hit, this is so much better. Although I can’t imagine it will be to your liking either if you don’t like pop music, even of the Latin-influenced variety. It’s about longing for someone, being heartsick and in love with someone who’s gone away and exists only in memories and photos. It’s a funny thing about photos. This one here: I took it two days before that other one, the one of all eyes and heart and torn edges. Two days. “In case you forget,” I wrote on it, “what I look like, especially when I look like this, here’s a reminder.”  We listened to Juanes together, he and I. After I left, I put Juanes away for a long time, along with a few other bands, most of them from Latin and South America. Maybe two years went by before I listened to any of it again, around the time we could finally have an email exchange without my feeling a rising panic, a sense of losing myself and being pulled into an unnecessary and multiple-day back-and-forth, instead walking away, breathing, and taking as long as I needed to reply - if I even replied at all - when things felt beyond my control. I think everyone does this with anything that plays into the rhythm and tactile experience of a relationship. A song, that song, forever ruined. Restaurants in whose booths your ghosts still linger. A latte preparation that can never be repeated. A photograph that you have to bury at the bottom of a shoebox, lock in a folder deep in the recesses of an external drive to keep you from re-imprinting the image in your mind, over and over. This photo, then. When I took it, I thought it showed how happy I was, how relaxed and at peace I was with a love I thought had been battled over then reconciled for the Nth time. God knows how many; at some point we lost count. Yet now when I look at it, this photo that I took three years ago yesterday, it is so clear to me, so obvious and plain and painful how exhausted and sad I am. The smile is in the eyes we always say, and in these eyes there is nothing but a realization without acceptance. The acceptance that crashes in a few days later and makes a long drive up the interstate even longer and angrier and lonelier. It has taken me three years to see this. It has taken me three years to begin writing about any of this. What I see now is how, when you are pushed up close against anything, clutching it to you like a photograph to your heart, you can’t see the truth in it. You can’t see the truth in yourself. Sometimes you have to walk and walk and walk, go as far as you can for as long as you can. There’s no set time limit, no “half as long as the experience itself” sort of equation. There’s no negating everything that happens after, either: The relationships and the people and the things you say and the things you do, those will matter too. In some ways they will be separate, and you will need to learn to separate them out and do them justice. In some ways they will be all tangled up in this thing and in the even bigger, unrelated things you will need to sort through, the things that will take much longer than three years to wrap your whole self around. But wrap you should. Unlock and learn, and then put it away more gently this time. Because you have looked like this too, haven’t you. We all have. Because it turns out what a person looks like, when she looks like this, is someone who is too close to understand the mountain she’s about to scramble down, whether it’s full of sheer walls or rocky slopes, whether it’s a towering K2 two people created together, whether it’s very much a molehill, or whether it’s a single summit in a range full of peaks to climb.
View Separately

Sometimes I joke that I’ll listen to any music, no matter how hokey or cheesy, as long as the lyrics aren’t sung in English. This is in fact mostly true. Right now I’m listening to Juanes. Juanes is a huge rock (okay, pop too) star from Colombia. The kind of huge rock star from Colombia who has won many Latin Grammies and who does a duet with Nelly Furtado. But it’s in Spanish! In Spanish, okay?

That song is playing right this second, as I type. It’s called Fotografía. If the only song you know by Nelly Furtado is her major English hit, this is so much better. Although I can’t imagine it will be to your liking either if you don’t like pop music, even of the Latin-influenced variety. It’s about longing for someone, being heartsick and in love with someone who’s gone away and exists only in memories and photos.

It’s a funny thing about photos. This one here: I took it two days before that other one, the one of all eyes and heart and torn edges. Two days. “In case you forget,” I wrote on it, “what I look like, especially when I look like this, here’s a reminder.” 

We listened to Juanes together, he and I. After I left, I put Juanes away for a long time, along with a few other bands, most of them from Latin and South America. Maybe two years went by before I listened to any of it again, around the time we could finally have an email exchange without my feeling a rising panic, a sense of losing myself and being pulled into an unnecessary and multiple-day back-and-forth, instead walking away, breathing, and taking as long as I needed to reply - if I even replied at all - when things felt beyond my control.

I think everyone does this with anything that plays into the rhythm and tactile experience of a relationship. A song, that song, forever ruined. Restaurants in whose booths your ghosts still linger. A latte preparation that can never be repeated. A photograph that you have to bury at the bottom of a shoebox, lock in a folder deep in the recesses of an external drive to keep you from re-imprinting the image in your mind, over and over.

This photo, then. When I took it, I thought it showed how happy I was, how relaxed and at peace I was with a love I thought had been battled over then reconciled for the Nth time. God knows how many; at some point we lost count. Yet now when I look at it, this photo that I took three years ago yesterday, it is so clear to me, so obvious and plain and painful how exhausted and sad I am. The smile is in the eyes we always say, and in these eyes there is nothing but a realization without acceptance. The acceptance that crashes in a few days later and makes a long drive up the interstate even longer and angrier and lonelier.

It has taken me three years to see this. It has taken me three years to begin writing about any of this. What I see now is how, when you are pushed up close against anything, clutching it to you like a photograph to your heart, you can’t see the truth in it. You can’t see the truth in yourself. Sometimes you have to walk and walk and walk, go as far as you can for as long as you can. There’s no set time limit, no “half as long as the experience itself” sort of equation. There’s no negating everything that happens after, either: The relationships and the people and the things you say and the things you do, those will matter too. In some ways they will be separate, and you will need to learn to separate them out and do them justice. In some ways they will be all tangled up in this thing and in the even bigger, unrelated things you will need to sort through, the things that will take much longer than three years to wrap your whole self around.

But wrap you should. Unlock and learn, and then put it away more gently this time. Because you have looked like this too, haven’t you. We all have. Because it turns out what a person looks like, when she looks like this, is someone who is too close to understand the mountain she’s about to scramble down, whether it’s full of sheer walls or rocky slopes, whether it’s a towering K2 two people created together, whether it’s very much a molehill, or whether it’s a single summit in a range full of peaks to climb.

Source: Flickr / ohheygreat

50 Notes/ Hide

  1. pocketcontents reblogged this from ohheygreat
  2. ohheygreat posted this

Recent comments

Blog comments powered by Disqus