"Let’s face it; we’re a generation with no tolerance for longing."
—
Melissa Chadburn | The Spookiness of Want and ‘The Marriage Plot’ | The Nervous Breakdown
I really liked Melissa Chadburn’s writing when someone first told me to read her and I thought of that today and went looking for her again and found this.
And—oh yeah.
I think of the tension that arises in me when a waited-for email or phone call doesn’t come within minutes, then as those minutes stretch into hours my nerves fray and snap. But what about slowing that down into days and weeks? I have to do that now, missing someone who is gone for months, and I am realizing how little I am equipped to miss people anymore.
Not that I don’t do it all the time—one of my dearest friends on earth lives across an ocean from me, after all—but it is an altogether different kind of missing, now.
I was talking to a friend this morning, and she told me she doesn’t follow her boyfriend on Twitter and I thought, yeah, that’s maybe a good idea? The constant surveillance, it’s not always helpful.
One of my favorite Lucero songs, “It Gets the Worst at Night”, has the wonderful line “On the way out of town/I drive by your house/two times.” When they do it live Ben always holds up two fingers and gives the audience a semi-sheepish grin, and everyone shouts “two times” with him because that’s such a human thing to do, right?
I had a boy who was The One Who Got Away (regular readers of this blog will know who I’m talking about) and he lived not far from where my parents still live. I used to drive by his house whenever I was in town and we weren’t together (which we were and were not, over and over, off and on, for something like six or seven years), drive by down his dead-end street which was set up so that I had to drive by it two times if I wanted to drive by it once. I never sing along with that song without remembering him.
That boy still isn’t on Facebook but most everyone else is and I almost miss those times when you had to do something a little wild, a little frightening, to get your fix. Longing isn’t a feeling, as she says above, that we are used to anymore. We replace it with too much information, easy adrenaline hits that are good or bad, and I miss the days when seeing a light on was enough.
I’m singing along with Fiona Apple’s “Shadowboxer” as I write this and I’ve been singing along with this song since I was sixteen, yes nearly half my life and I wonder if Fiona feels like I do about it, that I thought I knew what it meant when I was a teenager (she was one too when she wrote it, Fiona, three years older than me) but now it hits me in a new place. Each time.
It’s a song about longing, though, and maybe it wouldn’t be written the same now. I’m trying to think of a good song about longing for right now, a recent one, and the ones that are coming to mind are all Robyn songs, and they are about surveillance as much as longing, they’re about going to the club and seeing him with someone else, they’re about that exquisite self-torture that comes from observing.
Like I said about Charli XCX below, there’s always that knowledge that a little of it is your own doing. That awareness that is power even when you feel powerless. I told another friend today that I don’t think feeling powerless is ever helpful, which spun out into us talking about the idea of serenity, addiction, sex.
And sometimes love and attraction feel like an addiction themselves, you need that next hit coming, and my best way of figuring out how I feel about someone has always been to get away from them for a bit and see if I miss them at all when the fix isn’t coming.
It’s so hard to step away now and do that. There’s always some connection you’ve forgotten to silence. And so you’re looking for the microscopic changes in each little interaction, each little brush of contact like fingers at the end of your hair—you can feel it but not where it is.
