Bitter Sweet (Or Songs I've Cried To)

I. It is March of 2017. I am in the bedroom of my on-campus apartment. It is chilly outside, and I'm longing for sunny days, for the first time I can wear dresses without tights to keep my legs warm, for freedom, and in this case: the unknown. My first summer not bookended by school. The summer of the rest of my life. Instead of the overhead I just have lamps lit so my room is full of warmth, the darkness pressing against the glass. I'm laying in bed with headphones on, trying to find something to listen to. I turn to an old favorite on a whim. Alela Diane. I liked one of her songs once but not the rest, her voice dipping away from folk, too close to country twang for my liking. I find her most recent album: Cold Moon. Hit play. The songs are otherworldly, slow. They meander, Alela's voice lifting like a white sheet on a windy day, floating, longing to break free.

The ocean is the color that you saw
The ocean is the color it will always be
with or without your hands to paint it

As I sang into the night sky
I knew that you were stopping by
to say goodbye
Goodbye, Goodbye

I listen to the album all the way through. I don't move. I am transfixed. Even for all the talk of the ocean, the album makes me think of the desert - the way sounds carry, the sky so vast you can barely see the edges. As the album progresses I begin to sense the story the lyrics tell, of loss and questioning. Of wondering what happens when we die. By the end, I want to believe in souls.

Call it God
Call it whatever you like
to believe in souls
To believe that death is someplace
where there are no eyes
where there are no faces
no hands no war no death

Is it a colorless night
shrouded in white
do we return here again?


II. I am little, sitting on my parent's bed.  Joni Mitchell's "Little Green" emanates from a tiny first-gen iPod speaker. Her words, twisting like vines around the room. Her details, so tactile you can almost taste them:

Call her Little Green
For the color when the spring is born
There'll be crocuses to bring to school tomorrow
Just a little green
like the lights when the northern lights perform
There'll be icicles and birthday clothes and sometimes
there'll be sorrow

I'm filled with childlike joy - the kind that only comes from the simplest things like stacking blocks on top of each other or painting blindly on fresh paper. Joy for the beauty of the music and the melancholy of the words, though in my child's brain it isn't melancholy, just specific: Birthday clothes. Icicles. Northern lights. Sorrow. My mother tells me the song makes her sad. When I ask why, she tells me that Joni wrote it about giving up her child for adoption. I listen to it again, and the lyrics snap into place where before they were only pretty words:

Born with the moon in cancer
choose her a name she'll answer to
Call her green and the winters cannot fade her
call her green for the children who've made her

Suddenly, I'm crying. Suddenly the world seems bigger and more unfathomable. Suddenly the simple details take on so much meaning. I know my mom feels bad, but looking back I'm glad she told me what it meant. It cracked the song, and its details, wide open.


III. It is December 2017. I'm in bed again. I can't fall asleep. Too much coffee too late in the day and my heart feels like it's trying to patter it's way out of my chest, but my eyelids are heavy and my limbs feel like they're made of lead, like at any moment I could sink into the mattress. I listen to my "Sleep" playlist. I listen to "Cold Moon." Drift in and out of sleep. Somewhere in an old playlist: Anais Mitchell. I click on an album called "Xoa", hit play. Her voice, elvish, etherial, pierces and lulls at the same time. I'm more awake now, the opposite of where I want to be, but I don't care because I just want to listen to her words. Her songs are stories, tales of sorrow of grace of beauty and light.

Come out the streets are breathing
heaving green to red to green
come with your nicotine and wine
tambourine keeping time
you come and find me in the evening
Way over yonder I'm waiting and wondering
wither your fonder heart lies

Sometimes her voice molds itself into a wail. It tapers and grows, vibrates with something sad and beautiful and little bit jagged like unpolished crystal. I listen to it on repeat. Drift in and out of sleep. When I wake up, her voice croons softly through one earbud, the other slipped away from me in the night.

She's leading you home from the heat of the bar
to lie on the levy and look at the stars
you can hold her hand
you can kiss her face
go slow if you can
cause the world is a very sad place
cause when she leaves she'll leave no trace
and the world will still be there