this was a big field trip; I remember the sky
over the amphitheater as the light show synthesized
the air. Like most high schoolers at that time, I thought
Peter Gabriel had been born with So,
wielding a sledgehammer and giving Lloyd Dobler
the right song with which to woo Diane.
(Columbia House would have happily sent me
Gabriel’s earlier records, but I was too lazy to try.)
All of which is to say:
I found his earlier work later.
But clearly not memorably enough,
because this song comes on the mix
and I have no idea what it is.
Eventually the instrumentation clues me in
that it’s Peter Gabriel
and the voice confirms it.
It’s what radio (remember radio?) used to refer to as
a “deep cut”—and I am trying to figure out
what compelled me to reach for it.
We want to see you live a normal life—when I was
in my early twenties, did I hear this and think dread or
did I hear it and think yearning?
I don’t think it’s possible I already understood
that the answer is both at once, and that it can be
the yearning to be normal
that spurs the dread.
One last note:
As I was being driven to the airport earlier today,
the radio was playing some of my favorite songs
from some of my favorite times—
Belinda Carlisle’s “Heaven Is a Place on Earth”
Cher’s “Believe”
Imagine Dragons’ “It’s Time” (from before they
bombasted)—
Peter Gabriel might have come on next.
I looked to the dashboard, expecting some satellite
station, and instead it was 106.7…Lite FM.
The announcer even said it, “You’re listening to
Lite FM,” and I felt a profound betrayal by time
and airways,
because Lite FM had always existed
in the domain of dentistry and department stores,
diet music to prevent any rush of feeling to the head.
I know I’m no longer Z100’s target audience
but lite is a term I don’t want to claim. Please,
give the station back to Karen Carpenter’s subversions
and Barry Manilow’s lack thereof.
Otherwise, hand me Peter Gabriel’s sledgehammer
and let me smash the station before Nirvana joins the
playlist.
Track Five: In Your Care by Tasmin Archer
Much more dread than yearning here,
in another song I haven’t heard in at least a decade.
How could
you let
me down
when I’m in your care?
is the question posed, and I wonder now at how
I can understand what she means even though
I’ve never felt the same betrayal.
Sometimes the power of the articulation
is stronger than your own experience. Or,
perhaps even more, the song links two things
I have experienced—let me down, in your care—
and by linking them, I get a glimpse of
what her voice is telling me
is a hard road. As I get older, I realize
we don’t need the love songs that
blind us with the clichés. We need
the love songs that tell the truth,
and convey it convincingly.
Track Six: Walking in My Shoes by Depeche Mode
In 1995 or whenever this mix was made,
it would have been malpractice
to make a mix called Dread and Yearning
without at least one Depeche Mode song.
Here let me requiem for my dear friend Lynda,
as one mixtape leads me to remember another.
Toward the end of sophomore year at MHS,
a track list in Lynda’s immaculate handwriting:
Depeche Mode, Erasure, The Cure, Alphaville,
People Are People, A Little Respect, Lovesong,
Forever Young.
It opened my eyes to Blasphemous Rumours,
to the power in admitting out loud that God
has a sick sense of humor.
But the one that got me was Somebody,
how straightforward it was in its longing—
what the heart wants is really quite simple,
as the surf inexplicably comes to shore
in the background of the song.
Before you come to any conclusions
try walking in my shoes
—I never wore black in high school,
and any darkness in my days or my heart
was purely the mark of melodrama, not
experience. These songs didn’t confirm
my life; they expanded it, to make me ready
when the darkness needed to be wrestled,
in the name of love,
or of what love can do to us.
Track Seven: Here. In My Head by Tori Amos
You don’t want a song with this title
to be linear.
Maybe Thomas Jefferson wasn’t born in your backyard like you have said….
My mind has said so many things, some of them
as contradictory
as Thomas Jefferson.
Especially when we’re in love,
we play hide-and-seek with ourselves.
I remember the first time I saw Tori Amos live
(Berklee Performance Center, Little Earthquakes tour)
and the astonishment of how she played piano,
the full-body experience that led to the notes.
This is the transmission
from the keys and the wires:
The music in our heads always circles back around
to itself, and we search for ourselves
somewhere in the notes.
Track Eight: Mary by Tori Amos
Insane enough to have two songs by the same singer,
but to have them back to back…
what were you thinking, younger David?
There are rules to mixtapes, although I couldn’t tell you
how I learned them. The first mixtape I made
was for myself; the second was probably for my mother.
The first I received may have been the one from Lynda;
a little over a year later, my high school best friend, Cary,
gave me the first of our mixtapes, kicking off with
The The, This Is the Day, which is now the key song
in a movie based on a book I wrote. The soundtrack
of our lives only grows; songs may fall away, but they
can always return, sometimes when you least expect them.
Tori sings to us, telling us not to be afraid.
We’re just waking up
and I hear help is on the way
There has never been a time when it’s hurt to hear this.
There have been plenty of times when it’s helped.
The singer lets us know:
Help is on the way.
Just press play.
Fast-forward to it if you have to.
The first person who gives the song
/>
is the person who writes it.
The second is the person who sings it.
Then it’s up to us
to give it to each other.
I find it interesting to hear
what’s disappeared as we come
to the last song on this tape.
The dread has ebbed,
the yearning lulled.
What I’m left with,
more than twenty years later,
is that sense of just waking up
that a song can bring,
the spirit of understanding
that serenades us into believing
that we understand, that our lives,
even when they’re silent,
always contain music.
From that, we make our mixes.
TRACK TEN
Snow Day
On the day of Avery and Ryan’s fifth date, it snowed.
This was not out of the ordinary—it snowed a lot in the towns where they lived. But this was the first snowfall, and that always occasioned a certain amount of surprise. Winter was no longer deniable, even though there were still some leaves that had yet to abdicate from the trees. The days had already been shortening, a minute or two of sunlight leaking away each evening, but that wasn’t as noticeable as the sudden shift to snow.
Had Avery and Ryan lived in the same town, the snow wouldn’t have had much impact on their date. Their progress toward each other would have been a measure slower, a measure more thoughtful, but everything would have gone as planned. As it happened, it was Ryan’s turn to drive to Avery. Had they lived somewhere else, they might have met midway, but for them there was nothing midway, nor was there anything, really, within a fifty-mile radius. A pair of movie theaters. A few diners. A mall that had seen better days. A Walmart that had stolen away those better days for something cheaper. Places where you could hang out, but you wouldn’t particularly want to, at least not for a special occasion. And at this point, for Avery and Ryan, each date was a special occasion.
They had met at a dance—a gay prom—the blue-haired boy (Ryan) and the pink-haired boy (Avery) spotting one another and filling one another’s minds with music and color, shyness and an inexplicable but powerful urge to overcome this shyness. On their first date, they’d gone rowing on a stream by Avery’s aunt’s house. Talking to each other as they’d never talked to anyone else before, especially not on a date, they had summoned the ghosts of their former selves and the promise of their future selves—and it hadn’t been nearly as scary as each of them had feared.
On their second date, in Ryan’s town, they’d gone imaginary golfing at a mini-golf range that had fallen into disrepair. Their relationship had also threatened to fall into disrepair there, too, but romance had managed to triumph over rage, as Ryan narrowly avoided the trap of allowing bullies to bully him into doing something stupid. The third and fourth dates were more straightforward—movies watched on Avery’s couch (date three) and at Ryan’s local movie theater (date four). Ryan had now met Avery’s parents; Avery had yet to meet Ryan’s parents, but at least he knew the reason had nothing to do with him and everything to do with Ryan’s parents, who weren’t quite ready for their blue-haired son to bring home a pink-haired boyfriend (or a boyfriend with any other hair color, for that matter).
Avery’s parents had always been understanding—even before he’d realized he was meant to be a boy. When that had come up, they hadn’t dismissed it or tried to persuade Avery otherwise. And when Ryan had appeared in Avery’s life, and Avery had let him appear in his parents’ lives as well, they had been nothing short of welcoming. Avery wasn’t particularly surprised by this, even if it still felt like he was sharing a new chapter of his story with them, and he was a little nervous about how they’d read it. Ryan, meanwhile, was unfamiliar with this level of acceptance. He didn’t know how to act around anyone’s parents, because his own were so negating. It made him sad, how weirded out he was by how friendly Avery’s parents were. He hoped this second time would go smoother.
Ryan did not check the weather forecast as he grabbed his keys and left his house. There might have been murmurs about snow at school, but Ryan had learned to tune out all murmuring when he was there; most of the murmurs were nastier and less important than the weather report. When the first flakes hit his windshield, it was so gradual that it looked as if small, translucent spiders were dropping from the sky, leaving filaments in their wake. It was only when he was ten minutes from Avery’s house that the wipers needed to be turned on and the car needed to slow. The snowflakes had begun to crowd the sky, and Ryan could not help but smile at the snow’s sudden presence, the way something solid could materialize from air. Accio snowfall.
He felt he knew the route by heart…but sometimes the heart makes wrong turns. It was just a matter of finding the right way back on course. He could have called Avery to ask for directions, but he chose to rely on his phone’s navigational skills instead, since he wanted Avery to believe he could find his way from memory. (On the fifth date, you are always looking for ways to prove the path to the sixth, seventh, and eighth.)
Avery was waiting by his window, so he was aware of the snow, too. It wasn’t so dense that his delight needed to skid and swerve into worry. No, as he watched the downward drift, he wasn’t picturing Ryan in any wreck, or even imagining Ryan forced to turn back home. Instead he felt that elemental wonder that comes from seeing the world so casually altered, the transfixing sensation of watching something so intricately patternless fall.
When Ryan’s car appeared within the snowfall, Avery’s heart became the opposite of snowfall—that strange, windblown moment when you look and see the snow is actually drifting upward. Snowrise. When Avery saw Ryan pulling into his driveway, his heart was snowrise.
He was trying to guard this heart of his, but the guards were distracted. He was trying to cage his excitement, but he kept leaving the door unlatched. He knew it was dangerous to like someone so much.
There was nervousness, too. Ryan had been to the house before, but it had been a short visit, spent mostly in the family room. This time they were sure to explore further. Avery had control of his room, but he didn’t have control over the whole house. His mother liked to hang up family pictures, and as a result there were lots of photos of Avery as a kid, Avery before everything was noticed, Avery before everything was understood. His mother had been very clear about this: It would hurt more to erase the past. Better, she said, to come to peace with it. There was no reason to hide it, no reason to disown the child Avery had been. Avery thought it was much more complicated than this, but at the same time, his parents had been so cool with everything else that he didn’t think it would be fair to tell them to take down all the photographs of the time before. In some of the photographs, Avery looked very happy. On some of those days, he was. On others, not as much. Only Avery had access to the feelings that had gone on underneath. Even when he was just a kid.
He certainly couldn’t ask his parents to take down the photos now, just because Ryan was coming over. He knew it wasn’t worth it to try to curate his past, to try to present it to Ryan as if it had been otherwise. One of the most exciting and intimidating things about Ryan was the fact that Avery wanted to tell him the truth. This was what they’d recognized in each other. No pretending. They would talk to each other undisguised.
This made Ryan anxious, too, but it was an anxiety he was willing to navigate, the same way he was willing to step out in the snow and walk through the wind in order to get inside. He could see Avery in the window as he pulled into the driveway, could see his pink hair and could notice the lamp right next to him, the way it shone out on such a dimming day. Ryan had once heard the phrase leave a light on for me and thought it was one of the most romantic expressions he’d ever heard. He liked the idea that when you fall in love with someone,
the other person becomes your lighthouse keeper, even if it means staying up all night, even if it means staring out into the darkness until the darkness assumes the shape of your love and comes back to you.
Ryan turned off the car and almost immediately the windshield was covered. He turned off the headlights and for a moment there was the sincere silence of an entirely natural world. Even though his lighthouse keeper waited, he sat for a few seconds and listened to the music of the snow, to the slight tintinnabulation of snowflakes conversing with glass. He opened the door and let his sneaker sink into the sparse accumulation that covered the driveway. The cold immediately attached itself to his ears, his fingers. He raced up the steps, inaugural footprints in his wake. When he got to the door, it was already open. When he got to the door, he found Avery let loose from the window, Avery in a blue sweater, Avery smiling as if Ryan’s arrival was the greatest gift a boy could ever want.
There was a moment when they stopped and looked at each other. A little more snow fell on Ryan’s shoulder and dusted his hair. He didn’t notice. Not until he was inside and Avery was brushing it off, using it as an excuse for an immediate touch, a welcome that started at the top of his head and worked its way to the side of his face and down his neck.
“I’m so glad you’re here,” Avery said.
“And I’m so glad to be here,” Ryan answered. Partly because it was true and partly to be complementary.
Avery, having been inside the past couple of hours, had no idea how warm his house was, how it felt to Ryan as if cookies were being baked a few feet away. It was the kind of warmth you wanted to nestle into.
There were footsteps from another room, Avery’s mother calling out, “Is he here?” Ryan stomped his shoes on the mat, took off his coat, and handed it to Avery, who hung it on a doorknob, where it would dangle until it was dry enough for the closet. Avery’s mother appeared from her home office, welcoming Ryan and asking him about his drive. Ryan wasn’t used to this kind of chitchat from a parent—maybe his father would have given him an Is the car driving okay? but he wouldn’t have wanted to know anything beyond that. For Avery’s mother, it seemed like the chitchat was meant as an entryway into more conversations, more topics.
Avery’s mother asked Ryan to leave his sneakers by the door, but she made it feel like a favor rather than a command. Ryan complied, then felt like he was broadcasting the hole in the heel of his left sock. If Avery’s mother noticed, she didn’t say anything.
19 Love Songs Page 12