Yesterday, I had to work until 7:30 pm by myself. I was the only one in the building. Because it was quiet, because there was time, something settled into me. I thought about how, for the first time, I was heading into a new year where Alex wouldn’t be heading. Alex and I have been over for a long time, but something about the fact that he wouldn’t be out there watching the ball drop at the same time in his own respective residence broke my heart a little. I had always hoped he would figure it out….how to get better, be happy. I gave into crying about it for a little bit before zipping it back up and getting on with my job. However, because the grief keeps rising up a little, I decided to write a music entry about Alex—because that was one of the things we were both so passionate about, one of the things we shared—a fanatical love of music. So in homage to our relationship, to my dead husband, these are some songs that have memories of Alex attached to them…The plot wasn’t always great, but our soundtrack was fucking amazing.
- Hotel- Tori Amos
This album was one of the first gifts Alex ever gave me. Looking back, he probably stole it for me–but I was so obsessed with him, I don’t think that even occurred to me at the time. This is one of the songs Alex & I loved the most from it. We would always mimic playing the midi sound at the end. Over the years, I have come to appreciate other songs from this album more than Hotel–but …this song always makes me think of Alex. Excerpt from an entry in my OpenDiary from 2005, describing the day he gave me the cd:
Prior to my smart assical experiences in la classe de Francais, Alex and I had an interesting excursion at some CD stores. When it comes to music, we are both very opinionated. Actually, when it comes to anything, we are both very opinionated…but ESPECIALLY music and literature. In fact, I think that’s why we’re dating, so that we have the challenge of trying to make a convert out of another strong-willed, pig-headed person. It’s all about the challenge. We’re constantly making the other read/listen to what we love and getting offended when they don’t love it as we do. And then we force them to listen to it/read it till they get it. If they won’t listen to it willingly, we hog-tie them near the speakers and blast the music. Or we bludgeon them with the hardcover copy of a book of poetry…till they relent. So, basically, anytime we go to a music/book store we get in a huge (and often times, loud) debate, like the following transcript:
Alex: Do you like Genesis?
Me: (After I finish dry-heaving) Do you like getting kneed in the groin? Yeah. That’s about how much I like Genesis.
Alex: (Indignant) How can you say that? How can you compare the two? I mean, IT’S GENESIS.
Me: I don’t give a shit if it’s your momma on crack. I don’t like them.
Alex: Then you haven’t heard the right stuff by them.
Me: If you have to differentiate between their “stuffs”–it’s not worth it…
Alex: You’re full of shit. You do know that, right? You’re the one who used to have a f*ing Hanson album. HANSON! (At this point, about 20 people in the record store start to organize an angry mob and are looking for the nearest tree to hang me from
Me: Hey, step off! I was in 7th grade. That was cool then.
Alex: BUT YOU STILL OWN IT….I can’t believe you don’t like Genesis. Let me guess-YOU HATE THE BEATLES. They’re too “commercial.”
Me: 1) You can’t compare the Beatles to ANYONE…and certainly not Genesis, which eventually gave way to the career of Phil Fing “Air of the Night” Collins. 2) You say that again–that sacrilegious comment about me not liking the Beatles in a MUSIC STORE–and I will have to set you on fire.
Alex: Ok…but why you always gotta bring Moms into this? (We always say “Moms” when referring to his mom, as in “Did Moms call?” I dunno why. It‘s just funny.) AW, MAN-THEY GOT F***ING PJ HARVEY. DON’T TELL ME YOU DON’T LIKE HER!
Me: No, I like PJ. She’s coo’.
Alex: And you have been redeemed back into the inner circle of good taste.
[…] Anyway, after our little verbal crossfire in the store, he did something nice. He surprised me with the Tori Amos album, “The Choirgirl Hotel”-b/c he knows I love Tori Amos and he “thought [I] could relate to the lyrics and thus, they might be therapeutic.” He bought it unbeknownst to me and then, while we were driving around in my car, he put it in my bag, under the guise of looking through the books in my backseat. I found it when I went into French class. I was just like, “J’ai de la chance!” (I’m lucky! You know the modified saying: When in French class…act like the French.) He’s lucky he was about 40 min. away when I found the cd–b/c I would’ve mauled him to death.
- Do You Wanna- The Kooks
Alex & I loved The Kooks. One of my happiest memories is dancing to Do You Wanna Make Love to Me by them at our wedding. Everything else had gone wrong. My parents and older sister were being difficult. His best man had been kicked out of the wedding due to mental health issues and there was no one else there for Al. The cake was a lopsided, hideous goth nightmare of red and black fondant. & I didn’t even get a piece of it My photographer’s batteries died halfway through the wedding. Our dog howled through the damn thing. But then this song came on & we just held hands, yelled the lyrics at each other and jumped up and down while the world disappeared for a few minutes. I loved him so much then. Anyone who saw us in that moment would have believed in true love on account of it & been sorely disappointed by so many of the other ones that took place between us later.
Earlier, though, that song factored into a different memory…of us going to see them in concert. Here is an excerpt from an entry written in my original OD after after the concert:
Alex and I just got back from seeing The Kooks at Hamilton College. Kookalicious. I have had my epiphany though: I am old. Yes, old. Synonymous with “not fun.” Alex and I were the oldest people there, probably the only non-students, as we learned about it from The Kooks website–not by going to the college. No one in Utica listens to Britpop…No, here it’s more like ShitPop. (See? I’m cranky…a definite symptom of OLD, CRANKY BITCH!) So we were there, looking hot…sticking out…and booing the opening band, who really deserved it. Ah yes, the Waldorf and Statler of Utica. Then The Kooks came on and I realized this was one of the only college concerts I’ve ever been to where I wasn’t plastered…Even my college symphony concerts that I played in involved a fairly high blood alcohol content. .08…blew it. Then these drunk Asian girls bumrushed in front of Alex and I with this tutti-fruity little number of a boy…and they all jumped around like rabid jack terriers on cocaine. They kept bumping into me and I was so annoyed that I started throwing elbows. Alex stepped on the other kids foot b/c he kept stepping on Alex’s…
Do you wanna
Do you wanna
Do you wanna
….
make love to me?
I did however get to utter the most beautiful phrase in the English language tonight:
Look, that pretty blond girl just fell!
Poetry.
- White Chalk-PJ Harvey
He drives me to the appointment in my car. When he called to set the appointment for me, he had been told to use the back entrance to avoid the protesters & their props. Most noticeable props being the signs off dismembered fetuses that they flashed at cars & the rosary beads they prayed on between harassing scared young people entering the clinic for free rubbers or exams or procedures. We enter in the back and they make him stay in the waiting room, holding my coat & purse, while they usher me into the back. I take my pants off and lay down with the bleached, fibrous sheet over my lap, like god knows how many other girls before, as the staff administers the sedative that tugs me down into a forgetful twilight under the lights. I don’t remember the doctor coming in. Or the whoosh & the vacuum. In my favorite story by him, Hemingway called the procedure a reverse sneeze, letting the air in. Hemingway was a fuck. I feel the plot skitter away from me, as the nurse hands me my pants & gently tells me to get dressed. Due to either the manufactured wonderland of anesthesia or the inability to grasp the awfulness of what I’d done without completely breaking, nothing feels real. I gingerly slide off the table, the paper crinkles, and I make the mistake of turning around to fix it. I see the poppy of blood on the paper covering the table. I hear myself blurt out, “Can I see it? I want to see it.” I need to. I deserve to see the mess I created & abandoned. The nurse says, “No, dear. I’ll let you get dressed and then I’ll be back.” She escorts me out to him and the 2 of them try to force my arms into my coat sleeves as I weep. They lead me out to the car and he takes me home. He helps me to the bed, where I curl up and cry. I expect him to lay next to me, to hold me, to grieve with me. Instead, he is quiet, tense. I realize he is angry with me. He grabs his wallet and leaves to buy drugs. He is gone all day. I know then, it is over.
Later that year, we buy an album by PJ Harvey which tells the story of a girl that gets pregnant and aborts her child when her lover leaves her. By the last track, she has descended into madness & the album ends with her throwing herself off a cliff. He hates the album, while I can’t stop listening to it, for some reason—even though it hurts. I can’t hear this song without thinking of the day I knew it was over.
Dorset’s cliffs meet at the sea
Where I walked, our unborn child in me
White chalk over scattered land
Scratched my palms
There’s blood on my hands…
- Pioneer to the Falls- Interpol
The desk was a vessel that held important things from both of our lives. Important paperwork like our birth certificates & then our marriage certificate. Rolling papers for my cigarettes, his joints. The disks I kept all my writing on. Letters & cards from my friends I missed. Pictures from our trip to NYC and various concerts. Starts of poems & books. Artwork he doodled. After we got married, I put all the money we received at our wedding in the desk. We wanted to go to Paris for our honeymoon, had dreamed about it for years. When times were hard and he was dope sick, we would lay in bed and talk about seeing spring in Paris…about never coming back to America. The money we got as gifts at our wedding wasn’t enough to get there—but it was a start. I still remember the feeling I felt when I opened the drawer to find it was missing, his greedy veins nearly blown out with heroin. The feeling of betrayal that he had been getting high, been leaving me behind…with our wedding money. He had taken our dream of going to Paris, ripped it into confetti and blown it away.
All of it…gone. I couldn’t get over it
I tried to pick up the pieces in the spring, tape them back together. I rented a hotel room in a little town in the Adirondacks. It was still before the tourist season, before when the water park opens & campers head up north. But I thought we could go hike & get away from the city, from the drugs. Try to be happy again on a little mini honeymoon, the only one we could afford at this point. Only, true to our usual luck, we had a huge snowstorm—which made hiking impossible and nothing else was open there, really. We spent a couple afternoons at the Tow bar Inn in the middle of the day, writing poetry & reading books while the regulars stared at the 2 oddly dressed, out-of-towners. Other than that, we mostly spent the days in our hotel room with the lights off, staring at but not necessarily watching an America’s Next Top Model marathon on tv, as he smoked weed.
On the way home, the sun shone & it was unseasonably warm. I just remember us ruefully laughing about our shit luck as this song played. Shit luck. It was always shit luck. And we had made it that way.
- Waltz for Debby- Bill Evans
This album was the album we made love to the most in the early years. When sex lost its novelty, we would drink coffee in bed while listening to this…putting our mugs on the windowsills behind us between sips. He would lie next to me reading one of the many books he pilfered from various bookstores all over NYC. Meanwhile, I would be lying next to him writing out my sadnesses & disappointments over our relationship and my struggles with PTSD like a coward, instead of telling him. Eventually, even lying in bed having coffee together on a Sunday morning became a by-gone ritual-and fighting became our main form of intimacy. In the final years, he was living on the 6th floor of the Roosevelt. We were married but I kept my own apartment because he stole from me & sold my belongings. It was a hot summer that final year. I spent much of my time pacing around in his apartment in little silk nighties, but he no longer touched me. I just remember one scorcher, we were melting in the bedroom. He rolled a cigarette for me, a blend that tasted of peaches and a mossy forest in the summer…He lightly licked the flap before gently placing the cigarette in the v that my pointer and middle finger made. The gesture was so intimate, so tender. I was standing by the window, in my cream colored nightie, blowing smoke out the screen and watching it hang on the thick air. All of a sudden, he put this album on. Surprised, I turned and through the haze of exhaled smoke, I licked my lips & smiled at him, full of sentimentality. As I put the cigarette to my lips again, I pretended to inhale the memory of the couple we once were deep into my lungs, so it could always live in there. I’m not sure, we may have to listened to the album again after that, but that’s the last time I remember listening to it with him where it meant anything. Anything at all.
- Lavinia & Talk Down the Girl- both by The Veils
We are done. For good this time. I’ve moved back in with parents. I don’t tell anyone I’ve left him-including my parents. I assume they know it’s over when I move back in and he never calls for me. But because I never talk about it, he is like a phantom limb….there, but not. Causing me impossible pain. Even at work, I leave his pictures on my bulletin board, in picture frames. I lie about our relationship. I pretend I have to get home because we have dinner plans. I recycle old stories and pass them off as current events. When I’m at my parents, I am a ghost that spends my days wearing his holey & paint-stained sweatshirt. The ripped cuff still smells like him. The Armani Code I bought him the previous Christmas. To avoid my parents, I typically sit in a chair at the farthest edge of the yard, far away from the house, staring numbly at the trees…Most days, my dog lies sadly at my feet. I usually have my headphones in to help insulate myself from the painful reality. I listen to the same songs over and over. Predictability is comfort. These are some of the songs that played as my world ended and waited to begin again.
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