THESE DAYS,THESE DAYS

A Dear Friend of Mine, A Few Months Ago

I stared at him. I stared at his eyes, and then followed his golden brown lashes to where his cheekbones rested.
Then my gaze followed the soft curves of his face downward to his lips.
He enunciated his words with more precision and accuracy than anyone I had listened to before. His dialect may have been rather average in the region of London where he was from. However, as an American listener everything was quite dramatic, proper, and pristine.

He knew that each syllable uttered deserved to be represented in its’ intended form.

Oh, the tragic, eloquent things he said.


His words flowed out in torrents of darkened blue and hazy gray, but still maintained the direct, fluency of a thin rushing stream. He paused, and the flow stopped so that he could swallow a rushing trickle of wine from a tilted wine bottle. He wiped his mouth with his blazer sleeve and began speaking again.

“He was in love with both of them. He felt so incredibly guilty, people think he’s an asshole, but I know he just felt horrible, and could not take it.” He said while staring at the wall behind me.

“He fell in love with Annik, and as a poor boy from Manchester, meeting a beautiful music journalist from Belgium was the epitome of chic.” After scanning my face for a sign of understanding, he turned his slouched torso to put up a video on the computer .

The screen displayed Ian Curtis centered on a stage slightly elevated from a surging crowd. He stood with his hands close to his sides. Vulnerable, honest and swerving around the microphone. He danced wildly, his limbs limp, yet strangely energetic.

“Curtis was heartbroken, but a genius, that’s what he was.” My friend said to me, but did not turn his head, as he was still completely consumed by the performance on the screen.

I had been heartbroken before, I thought. I remembered old familiar embraces and the relaxed, closed eyelids of the boys whom I used to love. I could remember quite a few of those past, buried sentiments; but none of those recollections caused an anxious tension in my throat or my eyes to tear. None of those memories could make me feel quite like how my friend was feeling.

I felt guilty.

I remember thinking my friend was the saddest person I had seen in a long time. The girl he loved left him, presumably for his emotional unavailability, and he could not blame her. I had not met her but had seen her with him weeks before. On her head sat a large straw hat encircled by a black ribbon. She looked equally put together in a short, black dress dotted with white flowers. Her walk was reserved, but quick paced, as was his. They would walk quietly, hand in hand past where I would be smoking, invisible and crouched on the curb.

My friend was not just heartbroken, he felt too much.

I say that with a lack of better words, because the feeling is very familiar to me, and therefore so much harder to explain. My friend appreciated beauty, honesty and therefore the purity of the human heart. This explains his depression. He felt tremendous loss, as he was living a life on a planet where he had such little faith in finding the tenants he held dear.

He was reaching out and writhing like the roots of struggling weed, and the water he craved was basic humanity. At this point in my life, I was strong enough, or perhaps foolish enough to tell him of the glory of the crash of the ocean's waves or that “he would find another” or “the Internet helped small unheard of bands become more accessible.”

He hated the radio. He hated the distraction and the cheap, blurry sounds without direction, meaning or message.

What I think bothered him the most, were the songs lacking heart. He would press his ear against their hollow, poorly constructed shells and search for a beating pulse. Just the hint of a small, steady boom.

He hated that he would hear nothing, but liked that he could tell the difference between lifeless sound and music.

As this was in another time, I still had enough light in my eyes to be able to stare into his dark ones and say he could have or do anything. The truth is, he can. I think I said something along the lines of "you need to push past all of that, the noise, the silliness. You need to make what you want to see, you need to make the art.”

He listened politely, as he always would, but did not believe me. At this point I’m not really sure if I believe myself either.

In the search for purity, the white light of romanticism and inherent human good, I am now stumbling.

The purity, or in other terms the pursuit of “the dream” or the belief in an almighty god may explain the idea that things sometimes just feel right.(or wrong)


Another explanation for this blind faith could be explained by staring at the embers of a dying fire. Realizing their inexplicable orange-red beauty in contrast to the infinite black sky overhead.

Or by the things man will never be able to recreate.


The moments in time we will never be able to feel again.
The seconds where we laughed harder than we ever knew possible are over quickly. Then we are back to the droll tones we usually produce. Pitches that in contrast, are emotionless and flat compared to the dancing “HAUMPHS!!!!” and “HAS!!” we utter only when we permit ourselves to enjoy our existence.

The paintings you stand before and who then knock you to your knees. You are forced in front of them, kneeling as an uncomfortable and jolted youth. You become smeared and jagged, and are suddenly aware of all the other strokes around you; above of you. The acrylic wraps around your shoulders, and you grasp at the canvas, your only sense of grounding to fight against the smothering, dripping pull of paint.

The songs you can listen to and realize that what you are feeling is familiar to another.

The songs we search for when the silence is stifling and all the things we see are muted and falling out of focus.



But if the songs die,
and I think this might be my friend’s greatest fear,
can we be anything other than heartbroken?

-ANNA F-S