Michelle Zauner on writer’s block in the opening verse of Paprika, the first song off of the perfect album Jubilee:
Lucidity came slowly
I awoke from dreams of untying a great knot
It unraveled like a braid
Into what seemed were
Thousands of separate strands of fishing line
Attached to coarse behavior it flowed
A calm it urged, what else is here?
For the last couple years I have been tied up in a knot. Hands bound, I’ve been looking to other people to untangle me. Of course, that didn’t work and all my desperate reaching to them just made the knot the tighter. Like always, I’ll have to untangle myself slowly, methodically, gently. As the rope unwinds, I’ll ask for forgiveness for the time it took me to realize I was even bound up at all. Forgiveness from those who bared the bitter brunt of my restriction—those in the world who I love the most, the people who knew I was tied up before I knew myself.
The knot, which jumped around between my brain, the back of my throat and my heart, indeed made me bitter. Historically, thanks to the Herculean effort I typically put into a diligent self care regimen (the real kind), I’m not a bitter person, though I’ve never been particularly chipper, either. Instead, I fall on the upper bound of what lawyer-turned-author Susan Cain terms bittersweet. A bittersweet person finds sweetness in melancholy and listens to Mazzy Star—a band whose beautiful Spotify description written by Richie Unterberger was the source for the title of this post. In the introduction to the book Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole, Cain pulls quotes from inspired figures of the past who embodied this sensation in their productions, like C.S. Lewis, who perfectly described joy as a “sharp, wonderful stab of longing.”
All of the people in the photograph above, whether they know it or not, also see life through a bittersweet lens. This is one of the reasons why we all just had the most perfect weekend together, even though some of them had just met for the first time. I’ve already made two music references here, and close with a third. Music brought at least five of the people pictured above closer, if not together entirely. It is nearly the sole thing that Anthony, Ashton, Emaline and Chaz’s friendship is based on, and the music I played during yoga classes, where Anthony was my student, piqued his interest in me. Then he saw me at a Slowdive show and here we are five and half years later. Music has meant so much to me over the course of my life—from the Avril Lavigne Let Go CD my mom gave to me first thing after school in the carpool pickup line, to pirating songs off LimeWire on my family’s desktop, to making meticulous “yoga playlists”. Music brings bittersweet people together so they don’t have to loosen their knots on their own.
In my bunched up state, when the knot couldn’t have gotten tighter, I even let music fall through my fingers. I was in a rut, slipping to my depths for so long I lost even that. It’s coming back, thanks to weekends like this past one, and a phone call to my mother. A few weeks ago, I called her for the closet I could get to an embrace from so far away. I was at my depths with my hands tied, sinking. I knew, if I just let her have a chance at it, she could untie my hands for me. She told me, “everything will work out as you’ve planned.” I believed her.
To close, a lyric from The Cranberries’ An Ode to My Family, a perfect song:
My mother, my mother
She’d hold me
She’d hold me when I was out there