by Tom Bosworth // April 25, 2020
The final stop on our musical heartbreak journey (that I have planned, at least) is with a band called Odesza. If you follow me on Spotify, you probably have seen me listening to a playlist called “Electronic, but something is sad,” a loose descriptor for a genre I’ve always been drawn to. Bands like CHVRCHES, M83, and Phantogram all have different kinds of sadnesses in their synths— if we were to spread them on an easel, they’d all be shades of blue.
A Moment Apart has a few songs that I’ve fixated on, but the titular song is the that I come back to over and over again. It has a haunting hook, a melancholy, not quite human, but not quite not human voice that melodically sings “I love you baby / I loved you all wrong.” At least that’s what I heard on the first two-dozen plays. The internet disagrees, some posts suggesting “I loved your mess / I love you more”, another “I love you most / I love you more now.” Those are the only words, over and over again to a sanguine, danceable beat. It’s like that gorgeous, painful moment when you finally hear in “Hey Ya” by OutKast “But ya’ll don’t want to hear me / you just want to dance” and the whole song changes.
I had a great professor who has a whole collection of buzz words, but one of her favorites is “undecidability.” When a thing is either one or the other, but also both. Two possibilities at once, but also neither.
There’s a final couplet to a poem I read recently that I can’t find again but has been stuck in my head that was something like “my love was like a fish / in the wrong kind of water.” I might as well hear that in the song too: “I love you baby / I loved you all wrong.” Tragedy is in the tenses. Love is in the present, but the object Is stuck in the past. OutKast: “Nothing lasts forever but what makes / what makes / what makes love the exception.” If someone can hear “all wrong” from the lyrics, surely “all gone” is just as possible— barely a slant and he’s gone.
I guess what I’m trying to get at is that there’s something impossibly difficult about a relationship where everything was right but it fails anyways. My mind is constantly running scenarios like “what if this part was a little different or if I had sad this or if I hadn’t have done that or if he was a little more whatever.” But that is such unkind thinking. Bell Hooks writes in All About Love, “this process alone did not ensure self-recovery. It was not enough. I share this because it is far too easy to stay stuck in simply describing, telling one’s story over and over again, which can be a way of holding on to grief about the past or holding on to a narrative that places blame on others.”
It’s not a perfect book by any means and rarely did it acknowledge queer relationships in a deeply meaningful way, but when it does click, it’s a real gift. My biggest fear is that I loved all wrong, that I loved with the wrong kind of water, that I loved inconsistently or inadequately, that some sort of flaw of mine put an end to one of the most positive experiences of my life. All of my thinking up to this point has narrowed the answer down to “Maybe?”
But there’s fundamentally a fear at the root, for which Hooks offers, ““Love as a process that has been refined, alchemically altered as it moves from state to state, is that “perfect love” that can cast out fear. As we love, fear necessarily leaves. Contrary to the notion that one must work to attain perfection, this outcome does not have to be struggled for—it just happens. It is the gift perfect love offers. To receive the gift, we must first understand that “there is no fear in love.” But we do fear and fear keeps us from trusting in love.”
“I love you more now” can’t possibly be it, can it? I don’t know how to feel gratitude for something with a painful absence. It’s even harder to feel that gratitude for someone gone. But wow, did I love our mess. I probably loved us all wrong, but damn I’m trying to love us more now.