Still from HAIM’s “Want You Back”

During my craft talk about poems and sound, I play small parts of songs or music videos. I’m giving away the secret here, but it’s to distract from the fact that I don’t know what I’m talking about. Or, I do know what I’m talking about, but I can’t articulate it in any way that makes sense outside of the hamster wheel of my own brain. In some spaces, there is the assumption that anyone who writes poems wants to talk about the writing of them in front of people, and is equipped to do so. But some of us are just fumbling around dark rooms, occasionally lucky enough to find a light switch. And so, to not give away my fumbling, when I give a craft talk, I play songs. I play spirituals and gospel, and I play the rap songs that have sampled the spirituals and gospel. To talk about the magic trick of pace—of suggesting a big moment only to later reveal an even bigger moment—I play the iconic video of the Who performing “Baba O’Riley.” The one you’ve maybe seen, where the intro swells and swells until it feels like it could fill an entire stadium, and you might think, How can we ever climb atop this? But then Pete Townshend tosses his tambourine, steps back from the microphone, and windmills his arm around his guitar and shakes his ass in white pants while Roger Daltrey holds a microphone to the heavens with both hands.

But first, I play HAIM’s “Want You Back.” A specific part, around the 2:20 mark. All of the instruments drop out for about fifteen seconds and all that remains is the layering of voices, singing out “just know / that I want you / back” before the drums enter and the song rebuilds itself from the vocals up. In the talk, the point is about silence, I think. Or the point I’m trying to make is about how the voice itself isn’t the instrument. That language is the instrument and voice is just the vehicle, like a speaker or an amplifier. The point is about silence and the things we deem as percussion. How, along the landscape of silence, any sound that interrupts can be percussive. I make the point by pulling up a poem that has one word drowning in the otherwise white space of a page. That’s percussion, I say. In the poem “Katy,” Frank O’Hara writes, “I am never quiet / I mean silent,” and I assume people who have been lonely enough or isolated enough know the difference. Percussion can be even the gentlest interruption. Here’s a concrete example I give: two people on the telephone, near the end of a conversation, when the line between them falls into the depths of soundlessness. Even one person saying the words “I love you” is percussive. All our affections, coming on the backs of drums.

*

The thing I never learned to understand about breakups is that, even at their largest, the moment of the break itself might not be the hardest part. If you have no children together, or no assets worth squabbling over, or no other reason to hover in each other’s lives, the breaking itself can be sudden, with an entire world of grief to stumble into after.

I found myself thinking, recently, about an elevator ride after my last large breakup. Mere moments after our unceremonious uncoupling, my ex-partner and I rode to the ground in a machine. There was something interesting to me about being in such a small space with someone whom I still loved, but was no longer obligated to be in love with. Because we were both in pain, and because there was no one else in the descending box with us, we felt an obligation to comfort each other. Even through our anger, frustration, or hurt. We had to reach to whatever corner of ourselves could still feel compassion, despite what we’d inflicted on each other over the past few months (or nearly a year). We put our arms around each other and cried. It lasted less than a minute, probably twenty seconds or so. It was a moment unlike any other moment I’d ever endured in a breakup. It was a subtle acknowledgement of what could have been, but what likely shouldn’t have been and now wouldn’t be.

And then the metal doors opened, and the sunlight spilled onto our shoes, and we walked in separate directions.

*

So much of heartbreak is an animal born from past desires. Not just the desires themselves, but the things those desires asked us to ignore. Every person has things that can be easily forgiven in the right moment or the right season. I have known exactly how relationships would end, and I entered them anyway. The ego is always built into emotional undoing—to imagine myself as the one who will love someone into correction, even though I have never been loved so much that love alone undid the worst of me.

To want someone back after a breakup has been a trope of popular music for as long as I’ve been alive, and for decades before I was even a thought. It’s an age-old sentiment. Bonnie hopped on “I Can’t Make You Love Me” half resigned, and half committed to the guilt trip, dragging her sorrow to the center of town where an ex-lover has to pass it every single day. Mariah charted a map of memories on “Don’t Forget About Us,” a trick that has certainly worked on me before. In the sadness after the split, I have found myself missing the memories more than the person, and I’d be willing to reconstruct those memories with anyone, familiar or not. And then, of course, there are the beggars. Player on “Baby Come Back,” or Toni on “Unbreak My Heart,” or countless others. Begging is what comes when all else fails. All that remains is the expression of the desire that was never as hidden as it tried to be. I’ve never been begged, and I’ve not been much of a beggar, but I get it. I’ve stopped myself short, out of an even greater desire to maintain some dignity.

I like HAIM’s version of wanting someone back. I like it most because it begs so unmistakably, but it’s couched in a bouncy, almost celebratory sonic journey, so that we might almost forget it’s about the unbearable reality of grasping at the absence where a loved person once was. In between the chorus, there are smaller, more visceral promises: “I’ll take the fall / and the fault in us” or “I’ll give you all the love / I never gave / before I left you.”

If someone has done you wrong—and I mean truly done you wrong—there can be shame in wanting that person back. I don’t know how to best articulate that, so I’m hoping that you have perhaps felt it. I am hoping that you are not feeling it now, but have felt it before.

After my last large breakup, I found myself there. Someone did me wrong, and then departed. And yet, in the moments after their departure, I still longed for them. And I know, people would tell me that I was not longing for them, but for the space they once occupied. But I am certain that, even briefly, it was for them. And in that longing, I felt sadder, more ashamed. That I would want someone back who didn’t want me, and what that said about how I thought of myself. And then that passed, and I found myself with a new set of desires, probably fueled by the ways anger (even righteous anger) narrows the vision. I wanted an apology, or a scroll admitting wrongdoing. I wanted that person to want me back or, at the very least, realize they’d made some error.

The HAIM song “Want You Back” came out in early May 2017, while I was making the post-breakup move from New Haven, Connecticut, back to Columbus, Ohio. My belongings were still in a moving truck slowly making its way across the country, so my new Columbus apartment was empty, but for a television and a large trash can. The emptiness of the space and the high ceilings allowed for a type of infinity echo. I played the HAIM song on my phone, and each line of the chorus repeated and bloomed anew, furnishing the room with its weight.

*

The music video for “Want You Back” is a single, long take, by director Jake Schreier. It is filmed while a fresh dawn trots over an abandoned Ventura Boulevard. Part of the magic is in witnessing a place that you know should be buzzing with activity be entirely abandoned. A landscape upon which people shop, or laugh, or kiss, reduced to silence. It creates a fascination for me. Like waking up alone in a bed that you know another person once shared with you, and embracing the sprawl of your body in the absence, while also mourning the emptiness that allows your body to sprawl.

The shot begins with Danielle Haim, the middle Haim sister, leaning on a sign and looking longingly off into some distance. As she begins walking down the middle of the empty street, she is eventually flanked on each side by her two sisters. As the song hits its groove, so do the Haim sisters, each of them occasionally breaking out into a small dance move or two before falling back into step. The dance moves get more elaborate as the choruses pile on top of each other. While a choir of palm trees accumulate in the background, Danielle plays air drums before really committing to her moves, dipping her shoulders in and out of the morning air. Alana Haim, the youngest of the sisters, snaps dramatically, unfolding those snaps into some shimmying.

During the part of the song that I play during my craft talk, the video hits its peak. The moment where all of the instruments briefly retreat to the shadows, and the varied voices of the Haim sisters are all that remain to carry the tune. Alana Haim drifts slightly off, carrying the lyrics all on her own. A strip mall towers behind her, advertising shops no doubt made more generic for the sake of the video: PHARMACY. BAGELS. VEGAN CUISINE. CLEANERS. DENTIST.

This moment is short. Just long enough to create curiosity. When the drums arrive, so do the other two sisters, once again. The three of them step with renewed purpose, keeping time with the drums and then, as the final chorus hits, the contained patience of the music video falls apart in the best way, and the sisters give in to a comically large synchronized dance routine.

I love the video for how it shifts the idea of the “you” in the song. A video that flirts with isolation, culminating in a foolishly joyful celebration of synchronicity. That begins with a vision of loneliness on a lonely street, three people trying out their own individual moves until they find the ones that fit.

The “you” is another person, of course, but it is also the self. And I mean the best version of the self. After my last big breakup, once I began to get over the longing and regret, I looked in the mirror and realized I hadn’t gotten a good haircut in over a month. My beard, its own wilderness, cascaded in several directions at once. We all cope with our various heartbreaks and longings in different ways. I’ve found, throughout my life, that when I’m at my most sad I tend to stop looking at myself in the mirror. To be fair, I am not someone who spends much time in a mirror anyway. But at my saddest, I go to absurd lengths to avoid it: brushing my teeth while walking around an apartment, staying away from reflective surfaces, feeling around my face to see if anything seems out of place. It’s all so ridiculous, but I’ve found it’s easier than having to take real, concrete inventory of the damage.

And so, I stumbled out of the house and found a barber willing to cope with my unruly growth. It is the small things that propel us back to ourselves. The moments immediately after a fresh haircut is my thing. The sharpness of a good line. The reveal that my face might be something beyond a vessel for pain. I went home and cleaned up all the takeout boxes. I made myself a meal that I’m sure was bad, but tasted good in the moment. I gasped my way through a run. I expanded into all the versions of myself that I’d missed.

Longing for something irrevocably in the past isn’t just limited to romance, of course. As I write this, just a few miles down the road from my Columbus apartment, moving trucks are swinging open their wide doors. Parents stand outside of towering dormitory buildings, holding hands and watching their teenagers vanish down a long hallway. Ohio State is back in session, and the city transforms, as it always does. The relative peace of Columbus summer, the ample parking and quiet, is coming to an end. It’s all gone, once again replaced by a new crop of students. I welcome it, but I want the summer months back, always. Another diner closed to make way for what will probably become condos, and I don’t care that I hadn’t eaten there in three years. I want it back. I am reaching my arms toward the old architecture in neighborhoods I don’t recognize anymore. I am already mourning the possible vanishing of everything in my life that is not finite.

And, of course, the sweetness of those who have long departed. I have given up on wanting to bring back the dead, especially to a world that isn’t any better than when they left it. But I do long for the moments when they were alive. A hand brushing across a cheek or a 2 A.M. singalong. It is maybe unfair to have found myself again in so many different types of love, and still with so much desire. The dream of a wide and empty familiar street to stroll down. The marquee of a strip mall listing the names of everyone I have ever fondly missed. A song faintly painting the background while I dance myself away from sadness.

Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio.  

Still from Belly (1998)

It is hard to say when I stopped noticing the sirens. They’re still there, piercing the otherwise normal Wednesday-afternoon noise. But I haven’t noticed them for at least fifteen years. In the central Ohio area, a test of the state’s tornado-siren system takes place every Wednesday at noon. I would describe the sound for you, but even now I can barely remember it. I recall it beginning as a low whistle that bends into a loud howl, but the sound feels distant to me now. It’s indistinguishable from all the other ways this city rumbles its way toward productivity.

When I was a kid in elementary school, I assumed the siren tests happened everywhere. Twice a month, at noon, when the howling began to announce itself, all of us kids spilled into the hallway, and sat on our knees facing the wall. We’d lock one of our hands into the other, put them behind our heads, and curl ourselves downward. It was practice for the actual tornado, which we were told might come at any moment. It might come while we were in our classrooms learning whatever it is elementary school kids learned in the nineties (yet another thing I don’t recall). I never knew this was something exclusive to my school, or schools in my area. I imagined an entire chain of balled-up bodies, trembling against walls in school hallways across the country.

Once I hit my early teenage years, when tornado rehearsals were no longer required of me, my ears stopped registering the sirens. Most people who have lived in central Ohio for long enough echo this sentiment. We know the sirens only by those around us who haven’t been here long. The way they jump, or their eyes widen as they look to the sky, expecting chaos. That’s when I hear the noise again.

*

I would like to show you the opening scene of the 1998 film Belly, even if you have seen it already. Even if you are like me and have watched it many times. Under your own covers with a phone in your excitement-stricken hands. On a tablet while careening through the sky. On a television while friends hover by the door, waiting to go out, minutes after you’ve insisted just let me show you this one thing.

It isn’t worth explaining the plot of Belly here because the plot is entirely secondary. Merely a vehicle for the film’s focus on aesthetic beauty. I grew up in the nineties with a love for rap music videos, and I sometimes had ways to watch them. If my family didn’t have cable for a stretch, surely someone else’s on my street did. The Hype Williams music video consumed much of my interest, starting around 1994, when I laid eyes on the “Flava in Ya Ear” remix. Unspectacularly black and white, but still captivating, with all its up-close shots and the tenderness of its slow-motion moments.

I liked Hype most in the late nineties. Whatever can be said about the music has and will be said about the music, but rap’s shiny-suit era fit Hype’s interest in visual aesthetics. Bright, monochromatic sets and outfits, and fireworks. Belly came out in 1998, when Hype’s obsession with color was clear and often brilliantly executed. The film starred a cluster of musicians: Nas, DMX, Method Man, T-Boz, and others.

After a DMX monologue, the opening scene of Belly shows the black doors of an SUV spreading open like the wings of a bird homing in on its prey. Four men exit the vehicle and enter a strip club. They are bathed in a blue neon light. Their eyes glow. They are consumed by desire in a house of people consumed by desire. Everything is in slow motion. Something bad is going to happen, but there’s no telling what it is, until the camera cuts to a shot of money on a table, somewhere in the club. And then the men put on masks.

The song driving the scene is British dance-pop outfit Soul II Soul’s 1989 tune “Back to Life (However Do You Want Me)” but it isn’t the version that was released as a single in the late eighties, with its relentlessly danceable percussion and handclaps. The backing of that version made the song’s repetitive questioning of “however do you want me / however do you need me” an afterthought to the movement the beat unlocked in your limbs.

The version Hype used was the album version, which is entirely a cappella for the first two and a half minutes. This was the first version of the song, before it was re-recorded for radio consumption. Without any beat churning it forward, the song is equal parts haunting and harmonious. It is patient—it waits for the heart to give in to it, as opposed to the single version, which demanded the giving in of the body. The song’s questioning accumulates into something ominous and accusatory, but still heartfelt.

The opening scene of Belly is most jarring if you know both versions of the song, but especially if you know the more popular version best. If you’ve maybe forgotten that there is a version absent of noise. In the scene, by the time the men have donned their masks and run up the stairs, the vocals have collided into each other and the handclaps have begun wrestling for their own right to swallow some of the silence, and you know something bad is coming even before the guns come out.

*

Legend has it, the Shawnee tribe called Xenia, Ohio, the Place of the Devil Wind. It has been known for its storms since the late nineteenth century, but (at least outside of Ohio,) it is most known for the tornado that touched down in April 1974. The tornado was a part of the 1974 Super Outbreak, which remains the second-largest outbreak of tornadoes in recorded history. The tornado killed thirty-four people and injured over a thousand. It tore through half of the city’s buildings. Schools, local businesses, and churches were all leveled. It was the kind of devastation that takes decades to recover from. Nearly ten thousand people were left homeless. Some went away and never returned. Sometime shortly after the tornado hit, the city of Xenia purchased five sirens, for the sake of warning.

*

I was too young to go see Belly when it came out in theaters, and I didn’t hit a real rebellious streak of any value until the year 2000. And so, on a Wednesday at lunch, I snuck out of my high school with a few pals, and headed to the basement of someone who had parents at work and a big-screen television and a DVD of Belly purchased from a kid who sold burned DVDs at basketball games.

By 2000, Soul II Soul hadn’t released a proper studio album for three years. After an impeccable run of top-ten dance hits in the U.S. from 1989 to 1990, the group couldn’t recapture its magic. They were saddled by lineup changes. They stayed somewhat relevant on the UK charts, but as the nineties wore on even that began to fade. By 1998, they’d disbanded entirely. Doreen Waddell, a singer who worked with the group, died in 2002, after being hit by multiple vehicles while she was trying to run from security after shoplifting children’s items from a Tesco.

In that basement in 2000, while our classmates were collapsing into their desks after lunch, and our teachers were rolling their eyes at our absence, my friends and I sat captivated by the opening scene of the film. Not just the striking colors but the song that many of us remembered, though we hadn’t thought about it in years. When “Back to Life” first came out, many of us were just beginning to understand the ways that music could appear everywhere, and the song—in its non–a cappella form—was everywhere. On the bus to my elementary school, the bus driver would play the radio to drown out the noise of small, restless children, and I sat in the back of the bus, humming the chorus to “Back to Life.” With my head down on my desk as a seven-year-old during school-sanctioned nap time, I’d hear my teachers humming along to “Back to Life,” playing on loop in their own heads as it had begun to play in mine. Once, in the hallway, during the silence of one of our tornado drills, it could be heard faintly trickling out of someplace in the school where someone had taken a break and forgotten to turn their radio off.

It is one of the first songs I can associate with specific memories, and the first song I could define as a hit, even if I didn’t know what a hit was, beyond something that is so consistent in its appearance that it has no choice but to embed itself across spectrums, moments, and generations.

When I first watched Belly, I was captivated by its resurfacing. I was doing a bad thing while watching the bad men preparing to commit a bad crime, soundtracked by a song I’d loved once but hadn’t thought to play in years. And, when the guns are drawn and the bright orange fireworks spread out of their barrels, the familiar beat of “Back to Life” fully drops just as a woman is shot backward through a glass window and falls to the club floor below.

Through our youthful excitement, we didn’t hear the door opening. We didn’t notice the parent, home from work on a lunch break, standing at the top of the stairs, waiting to carry us back to school on a wave of curses. I didn’t watch past the opening scene of Belly until two years later, when I skipped a college class.

*

In September 2000, Xenia was hit with another tornado. It was the second one that had hit the town since ’74. The 2000 tornado followed a similar path through town as the one in 1974. It was not as destructive, but after the town had endured three tornadoes in less than thirty years, the accumulation of anxiety, fear, and grief weighed just as heavily as the damage. The 2000 tornado killed one person, and injured over a hundred.

In 2000, there wasn’t much warning. The storm knocked the city’s power supply out and the sirens purchased after the 1974 tornado didn’t have backup power. Only one of the five sirens went off, faintly. The rest were silent. No warning but for the sky itself.

*

Columbus gets about one tornado scare per summer. Not every summer, of course, but most of the ones I’ve been alive. I remember them from when I was a teenager, mostly. The sky would go suddenly dark, and the sirens would begin to wail. When it’s not a Wednesday, you hear the sirens. Some parent would call their kids inside, and the rest of us would follow, going to our respective homes and staying away from the windows.

The scares vary, from severe to forgettable. Once, two years ago, I had to retreat to the basement of my apartment building after the sirens lingered and repeated for nearly twenty minutes. People outside my window went from walking gingerly to fleeing for cover. This year, it happened about three weeks ago. Late at night, while my partner and I had people over, the sirens began. At first, the guests started slowly gathering their things, but continued casually conversing. By the time the second siren went off, there was a hastening, and our guests shuffled out the door.

My partner is spending her first full summer in Columbus. She is from a place where tornadoes rarely happen. So rarely that there isn’t a warning system in place. As the sirens repeated, and got louder and longer, her anxiety grew. It was a reasonable anxiety, of course. What will we do if a tornado hits? What’s our plan? Should we leave here and go somewhere safer? 

It wasn’t comforting for her to hear that this happens all the time. Nearly every summer. Be concerned, but not all that concerned. There’s no good way to describe the weight of a threat to someone who has never encountered it before. If you know violence only from a distance but have never seen it dismantle a place you love, it can be difficult to comfort someone who fears its arrival. We eventually fell asleep, and woke to the news of a tornado tearing through Dayton, a city only fifty minutes from where we live.

I have been thinking about the value of warnings. How, in my case, I know that something bad is coming from the silence and the stillness. I am trying to honor the warnings that come carried on the back of noise, but life has taught me to be most concerned when a room doesn’t move, or when someone I love stops talking and stares off into the distance. It is why I remain so struck by the opening frames of Belly, which drag along at a glacial pace, backed by a song stripped of its most familiar noise. The quiet is how I know someone, somewhere, is up to no good.

*

To say that the people of Xenia are resilient is true, of course. Many have rebuilt and rebuilt again, rediscovering their roots and maintaining a warmth and generosity in the process. There are those who have stayed for generations and will stay for many more. But I’ve also got it in me to want people to be defined by more than what they’ve been through. I want places to be defined by more than what’s happened to them. Back in the early aughts, my pals and I would stop in Xenia on the way to shows in Dayton, or Indianapolis. We’d grab food and make good conversation with local folks. I’ve held hands walking along Xenia’s covered bridges with someone I once loved. I’ve grabbed handfuls of strawberries at the Jackson Farm Market. None of this erases the past of a place. But the people who live there deserve to be affixed to something beyond tragedy. A soundtrack of their own making, until some other noise consumes it.

Hanif Abdurraqib’s monthly column, Notes on Pop, muses on the relationship between songs and memory. Read more here. 

Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio.  

Whitney Houston in 1991

Friends and heartthrobs of the past, future, and present: where I am now, the temperature has begun its slow climb, and summer is preparing its eviction notice for all the gentle breezes and drives with windows down and the incessant joyful choir of birds. We will soon have to settle for less pleasing aesthetics of romance. Sweat becomes romantic because it will happen whether or not I want it to, and I’ve got to make the best of it. During summer in Ohio, the storms come briefly, but violently, and seemingly out of nowhere. The sun will be out as you make your way to the car, but by the time you arrive at your destination, you’re trapped in a parking lot with torrents of rainwater collapsing on your windshield. I think I would like to call this moment romantic, too, for all the times I’ve sat outside of a grocery store, or a bar, or an ice cream shop, turning up a song that reminded me of someone in hopes that the music and the memory might intersect and silence the downpour.

It is a privilege to have seasons. Sometimes, in Columbus, Ohio, we don’t get much of spring. Winter digs its claws in and then it’s suddenly eighty-five degrees with suffocating humidity. The planet, of course, may not afford me many more years like this one. One where I’ve been blessed with a distinct turning over from one season to the next. I like it this way, being gently shepherded through, as opposed to dropped in the middle of a landscape already in progress. It is hard to create longing without the reminder of what we’re longing for.

Speaking of longing, I am here to once again consider the moment in the pre-chorus of “How Will I Know,” which creeps underneath the song’s ecstatic and bombastic uncertainty. Whether intended in the original message or not, this was the first song that most clearly articulated the anatomy and anxiety and secret pleasures of a crush. While Whitney drags out the words of the song’s central question as only Whitney can, the backup vocals trickle in with “don’t trust your feelings,” which is the moment that feels the most true to the real-life conundrum. A person, shaky, but fantasizing toward confidence while, underneath, their friends try to whisper them back to reality.

It is not true that all people get crushes and it is not true that all people want to be someone’s crush. And it is definitely not true that these things happen in equal measure for everyone. But for the people who do crush and want to be a crush, I think that desire can rise and dissipate with the movement of seasons. I always found that my hopes of having a crush existed most eagerly in the early months of a year, as winter faded away. Those hopes peaked in the middle of summer, when I would strive to be romantically unattached, so that my heart could be tugged in any direction it pleased. I would guess this seasonal relationship might have to do with the structure of my life when I first discovered what crushes were. Which is to say, when I was in school, especially when I was in school but before my friends and I could drive, when even if a person was romantically linked to someone else, they would most likely part ways before the school year ended. Or pretend that they were going to give it a try over the summer if they lived in neighborhoods that were close enough. But, in the end, the seemingly never-ending possibilities of summer won out. In summer, small relationships or imagined relationships banished the larger relationship to the locker bays of the high school. At Warped Tour, a crush would accelerate into a daylong fling, because time was fleeting, and there was none of it to be wasted hand-wringing over maybes. And so, summer, even as an adult, is the time when I allow myself to be most susceptible to crushing on someone. Then, as the fall arrives and the cold begins to circle back around, I want to be indoors, preferably with a person I’ve had a crush on in the previous months. Your timeline may vary, of course.

There are many approaches to having a crush, and significantly fewer approaches to being someone’s crush. For the latter, some may be interested in knowing who has a crush on them and why, and I do see a lot of value in having that information. But for the former, I am too anxious for any interest in reality. Whitney Houston seems to be the questioning type, though none of us can say how long she’d been mulling over the questions before they spilled out. I can hold a crush longer than most of my friends can hold a grudge. I don’t really need or even want to know whether a person shares my affection. I’m content just letting the situation play itself out at its own pace. I get that for most people, this seems agonizing. But, for all of the agony, what you get in return is the imagined person and not the actual person. Or, if you’re lucky, you get to hold off on the actual person for a little bit longer, until you get to be with the actual person. Whitney’s agony seems more urgent, it ticks my heart rate up a notch when I listen to the song. Which, it must be said, is one of the most perfect songs ever crafted. Whitney is saying prayers! She is picking up the phone and dialing some numbers but then hanging up again! It is all too much! Though I’m not one to judge the manifestation of anyone else’s desires—particularly if those desires have been bubbling up to the surface with an unsustainable ferocity!

But where Whitney and I meet is this: the idea of falling in love over and over again within an endless loop of uncertainty. Sometimes, it isn’t even the person you’re falling in love with, just the uncertainty itself. I have been known to take everything as a sign, even if I am lying to myself. That’s part of the fun. It’s the idea of certainty that drains me. Sure, someone saying they don’t dig you like you dig them doesn’t stop a crush dead in its tracks, but it does make the emotional journey more finite. I don’t know much about love, and I don’t wish to know any more than I already do. Like Hayden at the end of the poem “Those Winter Sundays” where the reader can almost hear him, frantic and throwing up his hands:

What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?  

I give in to that question. There’s no satisfactory answer. And maybe there isn’t an answer to Whitney’s questions, either. I have cursed myself for misreading all my crush’s signals, but I have still felt thankful for the time those signals were there for me to read in the first place. To have a crush can be joyous labor, and can also be anguish, and can also be something that will vanish in a day or an hour and never be revived again. While out with my friends now, we’ll see an old acquaintance from afar and we might exclaim, “I can’t believe I ever had a crush on that person!” and we’ll laugh at the foolish desires of our past selves. And I like that part, too. Even if it is played up for effect. To crush now may mean to stay up well past your comfortable waking hours, gently scrolling through rows of old Instagram photos and attempting to not accidentally like one of them, despite your fingers quaking with excitement. There’s this old Kevin Durant tweet I love from 2010. It reads: “#uever wake up n the middle of da night and think about a girl u like or startin to like and sit at da edge of the bed n say damn i want her.”

And yes, surely that is one of the inescapable parts of a crush, too. The things that keep you awake, or send you to the edge of a bed, speaking out loud to no one but yourself and the world you’ve built with a person who—if you are one of the lucky ones—might be at the edge of their own bed, thinking of you.

Whitney’s tune doesn’t end with resolution. It ends with desire piling on top of more desire. She was always better at that than she got credit for. Whitney’s voice and the singular stamp she made on ballads is memorable, of course. But so is the way that she set a blueprint in pop music for how to unfold desire without resolving it. I hear it now in Carly Rae Jepsen, in Robyn, in so many others. “How Will I Know” ends with an accumulation of the words how will I know sung repeatedly. Nothing promised except another rotation of the question. On the end of the third and sixth rotation, the background singers chime back in. First with I say a prayer. And then, I fall in love. It is hard to hear, because it comes as the song fades away, but it’s there.

Falling in love can be an isolating act, even if another person is present while it is happening. It’s all so interior, based on many moving parts and internalized messiness. It isn’t always like this, of course. But when it has been like that for me, I’ve come out of it happily exhausted, wondering why anyone would want to do this more than once in a lifetime. But, of course, when whatever love I’ve claimed fades, I find myself renewed, in search of the feeling once again. I have found ways to renew it even while still in love. Last fall, there was a point where I had a crush on the leaves, for all their twirling and kaleidoscopic showing off. I have a crush on the first few days of daylight saving time in either direction, when the sun does a real generosity and tricks me into staying out longer and later. Or, when it abruptly exits early, reminding me to bow to my true self. I have a crush on the way the familiar buildings of Columbus, Ohio, poke their faces through a puffy wall of clouds when I descend into the city after being away for too long, and it is always too long. I have a crush on too many sentences in too many books by too many people to name. Since I have already decided that sweat is romantic, friends, let me say that I also have a crush on the feeling of night air cooling the sweat off skin when a body pours out of a hot and packed space. I am beginning to have a crush on crystals, I think. Definitely obsidian, but perhaps a few of the others that look like miniature caves. And, yes, I have a crush on memories that were surely not as beautiful as I have made them out to be. Because that’s the whole trick. I’ve had crushes on all my friends, and if they don’t have one back on me that’s fine because I’m still going to text them at unfortunate and odd hours of the day with some useless miracle that I couldn’t possibly keep to myself. So few of my crushes speak back. I am cultivating my comfort with unanswered desires, and it is going well. I have room for so much more. I say a prayer. I fall in love.

Hanif Abdurraqib’s monthly column, Notes on Pop, muses on the relationship between songs and memory. Read more here. 

Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio.  

Source: Thinkstock

I find myself most aware of silence when I am thinking about the many ways it can be punctured. Under the wrong circumstances, a hospital room can become a symphony of noises, each of them courting the worst of a person’s anxieties. There might be an incessant but inconsistent beeping, or the sounds of several machines doing the work of keeping a person alive. It is a privilege to be told that someone you love is going to survive. The message comes from some exhausted doctor, eager to give the good news after the tests, or the surgery, or whatever else. I have also been on the other side: knowing that I would be watching a person I love slowly fade until they vanished altogether, and understanding there’s nothing that can be done.

There’s something uniquely challenging about the moments in between, when the good news of a person’s continued living is delivered, but they still have to stay in a hospital room for a few more days before they can go home. From far enough away, underneath a wave of monochromatic hospital blankets, it can be hard to tell if someone is still breathing. Particularly if you’ve already imagined a world without them in it. If you’ve spent enough time imagining someone as dead, it can be difficult to visualize them as simply sleeping. I don’t love hearing the beeping and the sonic hiccups of hospital machinery, but it is worse not to hear anything.

I had never spent a night with someone in a hospital until my early twenties, with a person I cared about a great deal who was dangerously unwell and then suddenly well, but not so well that she could leave the haphazardly wallpapered hospital room. At the time of her hospitalization, my friend’s parents couldn’t make it back into the country from a long trip they were on. The hospital, in a gesture of understanding, allowed me and two of my other friends to pose as family members. We took rotations, watching anxiously over the hospital room and its cacophony of worrisome tunes. My other two pals had stable, serious, adult jobs, but I was a slacker, working part-time at some chain bookstore. With that in mind, I was the one who stayed overnight.

In “Night Shift,” Lucy Dacus sings “I’m doing fine / trying to derail my one-track mind” and it sits in the exact right place in the song—early in the first verse, before the all of the instruments pull up to the feast. Sung slow, so that a listener can feel the weight of every word. A line like this, sung like this, has maybe been traveling toward me for an entire lifetime. When someone you love is alive but still not home, it might be impossible for you to think of anything other than death. In the hospital room, I was given a couch to sleep on, but the couch was shorter than I was, so I stared at the vines and flowers spilling into each other along the peeling wallpaper. I didn’t sleep much, pacing the room every hour and staring at the blankets laid across the sleeping body, waiting in the dark for them to slowly rise.

*

There are many different night shifts, and I will admit that some of them have enticed me with the romance of moving through the world while everyone else sleeps, and sleeping while everyone else consumes whatever the world has to offer. I suppose this is how I was seduced into the front-desk job I held at a hotel on the edge of a Columbus suburb back in 2007. You needed no experience, just a willingness to be upright and kind of awake, and I figured I could pull off at least one of those things. I was crawling out of a breakup that I didn’t know how to write about or talk about. In those days, I imagined daylight hours as no time to build a graveyard for memory. I couldn’t do what I needed to among the waking, forcing myself to run errands or pulling the shades down against the sun. No, in the middle of the night was when I would piece myself back together.

Sometime in the second verse of her song, when the instruments are inching closer to their promised chaos, Lucy Dacus sings: “Now bite your tongue / it’s too dangerous to fall so young,” and I think of the grand work of getting over someone and the many ways I’ve gone about it. The time I decided to run a full marathon two months after a split. Or how I still shed my record collection with every new breakup and begin to rebuild it in the months after. These, for better or worse (often worse) are my ways of talking through longing and loss with myself. Dacus is a great songwriter, sure. But greater, even, is her ability to make an internal dialogue feel like a conversation with an old friend, which is all getting over people has ever been for me. Talking myself into circles as if the whole world is listening to confirm my worst and wildest ideas.

In my night shift at the hotel, I watched late-night shows on a TV drowned in static. When I began to memorize the 3 AM infomercials, around my fourth day on the job, I brought in a small DVD player and some DVDs from home. I watched His Girl Friday nearly every night, pulled from a Cary Grant box set that had been collecting dust on a shelf. I figured if I had that movie playing, and any guest came in, they would assume it was just something already on the television. But few guests came. A couple would stumble in drunk and excitable or sober and tired every two nights. Mostly it was just me, figuring out ways to archive not only my heartbreak, but the onslaught of memories fueling it. From where the hotel sat, a person could walk outside at night and not see much of anything but darkness for what felt like miles. It was rare for the sky to feel this big in a city, but it did from our little corner. When I’d drive home after my shifts, that same sky would be a quilt of new colors, unfurling to make room for the sunrise. Sometimes, all that it takes to get over someone or something is waking up. You wake up one day, and you’re fine. It is all a matter of how and what the night shifts. On my last day at the hotel, I made the mistake of sitting down at 3:30 in the morning. I fell asleep in a chair behind the desk and was jarred awake by the echo of a man hitting a bell at the front desk nearly two hours later. He was, perhaps, not entirely sober. He didn’t want anything in particular, he told me loudly. The sun was just coming up, he said. And it looked like it was going to be a good one. He didn’t want me to miss it.

I quit the job the next day, after just three weeks. I quit because I wasn’t sad anymore, though there isn’t a good way to say that out loud while hoping for a reference from a former employer.

*

In the early stages of my current relationship, my partner and I were separated by three hours worth of time zone, with me on the later end. Being in a long-distance relationship worked on the parts of myself that became selfish while I wasn’t looking. If her day finally became quiet at 8:30 PM, we’d make plans to talk then, even though it would be 11:30 PM my time, and I’d be otherwise winding down. I would, eagerly, choose the excitement of staying awake in bed on the phone or with a grainy Skype video in front of me, unraveling all the threads of potential within this new romance.

There’s something about staying up late on the phone that, for me, still feels like getting away with something. Lucy Dacus asks “Am I a masochist?” and though the impulse for asking isn’t the same, I found myself in the grips of that same question. Fighting to stay awake on the phone with someone is romantic, even if the mornings after are less so. But it all becomes worthwhile, when you understand that the voice is the only thing that can bring you close to someone you wish were in arm’s reach.

I learned to value the way a voice can interrupt longing. How it builds a bridge that feels real from the place you are to the place you want to be. How its familiar sound can heal and reassure under even the worst circumstances. The thing about a hospital’s silence, the thing that has always haunted it for me, are the moments when a person you love cannot speak. If they are not awake or unmoving or hooked to machinery. Even after a doctor promises they’ve made it out of the woods. I just want to hear the voice of someone I care for, telling me they’re going to be okay.

*

Children are made to believe miracles happen in the night. A tooth, free from the mouth’s grasp, becomes currency. From underneath a tree, gifts appear. All of this happens while the eyes are closed, which means that, for the curious, staying awake to peep the miracle becomes a duty.

I didn’t grow up with those particular mythologies. No tooth fairy, or Santa, or Easter bunnies. If I lost a tooth, my reward was the opportunity to grow a new tooth in its place. But I still love the night for what opportunities it might offer in the way of witnessing. Even the unspectacular looks more spectacular when colored by the moon. Broken and mended hearts, alleyways where the whites of dice glisten like small exposed bones, the bar that closes and the parking lot that doesn’t, and, mostly, the potential to dream and not remember anything but the fact that you were granted a chance to dream.

I like a song that sprawls. Six minutes or longer. It’s the potential in it that I love—the song has more space to stretch out and transform. There is a payoff at the end for whatever it circles in the beginning. When the song ramps up, and all of the instruments hungrily stumble over each other, Lucy Dacus wrings the feeling out of the back end of the chorus: “In five years I hope the songs feel like covers / Dedicated to new lovers.”

That’s the miracle, too. The impossibility isn’t in the breakup, but in whatever comes after. The very fact that someone can be driven to write a love song and then a breakup song about the same person. The thing that happens when people are with someone and they can’t imagine a world without them. The thing that happens when people fall out of love and can’t imagine the world they had before. The song, becoming something newer and better as an old wound closes, or a new wound opens up. The pink light of dawn is a salve or a scar, depending on who is doing the looking and what the night offered up or stole away.

Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio.  

To begin with a fact that is entirely beside the point (unless you are the owner of a Michigan area code and a very particular type of pride): South Detroit is, in fact, not a real place, at least not within the flimsy geographical construct of the United States. Anyone beginning in Detroit and traveling south will, because of how the borders are drawn, end up in Canada. From a geographical standpoint, South Detroit is Windsor, Ontario.

The restaurant South Detroit, which is in Windsor, Ontario, was opened by someone with a slick sense of humor and a sharp eye for nostalgia and aesthetics. Since we are burdened with borders, it must be said that there are a lot of good reasons to travel to a border and then cross it. From Columbus, Ohio, where I grew up, the drive to Windsor, Ontario, is about four hours. Three and a half if you disregard the speed-limit signs posted along Route 23, where there are no blue-and-whites hiding along the high grass, and even if there were, they wouldn’t dare flick on their sirens and interrupt their downtime, reclining along the road. My friends and I would make the trip to go to the South Detroit diner in Windsor—passports and all. We’d wait in the long line clogging up the bridge to another country. The food at the diner wasn’t at all spectacular, and my pal Kyryn claimed they didn’t know how to mix a good cocktail—I don’t know much about drinks, so I took her at her word.

What South Detroit did have was a good jukebox. I like a jukebox that requires labor. I’m not aging into one of those fist-shaking olds who sits on a porch and bemoans the fact that kids these days don’t play outdoors or that people stare at their phones or whatever else gets said about the younger generations. But there is the fact that I prefer a jukebox, one that cannot be controlled by a phone. I believe in accountability everywhere, even as it so eagerly escapes much of our day-to-day lives. And so, I must ask for accountability at the jukebox, where people know what songs I’ve played, because they’ve watched me approach the machine and fumble for my coins and scroll through the options. They’ve watched me sit back down and glance eagerly at the machine as each song ends, if they’re watching closely. If they keep watching, they might see a half-smile leap from the edges of my mouth when the first notes of my tune arrives. The jukebox alone is just a vehicle for sound, same as any other. But when a person enters, they can attach themselves and whatever hopes they have for the night, to that vehicle, and it becomes something greater.

The jukebox at South Detroit in Windsor had nothing overly spectacular, if I recall. The space didn’t have enough room for people to dance organically. And so, the key was getting a good run of songs going. Something that might force people to push a table or two to the side or move a couple of chairs. Wherever the desire for dance is born, there’s a moment when it spills out of the body, and I love a space that can be restructured into a temple for movement.

I know how this sounds, the idea that someone would cross the border into another country just to play some songs on a jukebox at a place named after a mistake some singer made in a song once. But you must know, of course, that South Detroit no longer exists. On my third or fourth trip there, in 2015, the lights were off and there was no one buzzing inside. If you are from a corner of a city where places close down, you know the difference between a place that is closed, and a place that has closed. It’s a feeling, mostly. Not just wondering if you’ve come at the wrong time or the wrong hour, but beyond that: the knowing that there hasn’t been anyone inside of a place for far too long.

So, of course, this isn’t just about jukeboxes or dancing, this is about longing for a place that both no longer exists and never did. This is an ode to an imaginary place, torn down. I am from a part of a city that might as well be an imaginary place. I cannot show people all of the things that made me. The basketball courts I played on are cracked now, and no one hangs nets on the rims. The hill I rode my bike down has been leveled and the church that sat at the bottom is gone. The Dairy Queen that I’d pop into at the end of those bike rides was a chicken shack for a while, then a check-cashing place for a while, and now it’s just another empty building. A sign with nothing on it. Even the streetlights have been taken from the blocks I once ran down, attempting to get home before the beams of streetlights flickered and coughed some fractured brightness along the pavement. The streetlight people were another marker of that pop song I’d push into the juke at South Detroit in Windsor, where everyone knew all of the words. I am finding the distance between memory and belief to grow shorter by the year. I am constantly using memory to convince myself that I’ve lived and experienced something. That my belief in the world has been shaped by some magic I’ve been a part of, even if I can’t go back to all of the places that magic sprung from. If the old bar is a new bar, or nothing at all. If the pool hall is an organic juice shop. A singer names an imaginary place in a song, and I can’t help but think of all of the places I once touched that are no longer real.

Once, on a drive back from Windsor, a friend asked, “What is the point of the song if we don’t know what we shouldn’t stop believing in?” And another said, “Yeah, what is the feeling we should be holding on to, exactly?”

The only way to answer is to measure how many things we love have been made into ghosts, and how much time we have spent grasping at them.

Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio.