Hi,

Last Sunday marked four years since I moved to New York. I first came to the city the day before Biden was inaugurated, and I watched him take office on my laptop from quarantine in a windowless room. It was in the middle of the pandemic but there was still a dim surge of hope pulsing under the city. Maybe it was just my optimism speaking as I started my new life. Either way, that feeling seems far and innocent now, especially after these harsh January weeks.

I thought I had a clear picture of myself before living here. Just a few weeks of the beauty and coldness turned me inside out. Everything came into focus — all my fears and beliefs and the sounds outside my window became sharp and real in a matter of days.

When people ask what it’s like to live in New York, I always reply that it’s hard but good. Impossibly the best thing I’ve ever done. There is so much food to try and art to see. So many conversations to overhear and strangers to meet! The funniest thing about living here is how everyone is secretly really rich except for you. The best thing about it is the way the city protects and hurts and fights for its ideas.

One of the ways the city cares for you is with its secrets. There are pockets of New York that exist only for you. True things you can only learn alone. A few years ago, this creed fell into my lap with a late night habit in the West Village.

It started on a Saturday night when my friends were visiting from Boston on a whim. We went to the Queens Night Market and had dollar dumplings and tea before wandering into the city. I don’t remember where the recommendation came from, but my friends were adamant about us visiting this jazz bar, Smalls.

Smalls, I found that night, is a basement bar on West 10th Street that has a line of people waiting down the block most nights. If you go late enough, you can walk right in. Down some steep cellar stairs, it’s an intimate brick-walled room covered in pictures of jazz musicians in low lighting. You’re almost on top of the artists playing their hearts out on the tiny stage before you. Entry to Smalls is easier and free after 1 a.m. because any musician can come onstage to have a little jam. There’s a fuzzy understanding in the room that if you’re there, you’re lucky to see whatever you’re seeing.

So I went that summer with my out-of-town friends when my life was still starting, when I was still funny and eager to please. I felt dizzy and full from dumplings and happy to be in the dark, listening to loud trumpets and counting time. I couldn’t look away from the stage and hours went by in just a few seconds. Every song felt like coming up for air, clawing at an unmistakable richness. Don’t laugh or make La La Land jokes — I had listened to jazz before but had never seen anything like this! And it wasn’t just the live improvisation that transfixed. The bartenders were brewing coffee at 2 a.m.! Every stranger became a friend! I flirted with a pianist who winked from the stage and stayed until the lights came on. It was a whirlwind with music so alive I knew I had to see it again for myself. I decided to go back alone.

I was so nervous to return by myself, plagued by some fears about jazz exclusivity and being defenseless in a new place. I worked a night shift at the time, so I told myself I’d just stop by on the way home. But the first piano chords rang out and lapped up all my plans. I got swept away again so quickly, sitting in the back next to other stragglers with my ears ringing from the high notes.

The group closest to me had just gotten off their shift at Dante a few blocks away and roped me into their low stakes debates in between songs. We were eventually joined by a charming, rambling older man who didn’t finish any of his sentences but kept making us laugh. He kept threatening to perform, which made us laugh harder because he seemed like a drunken regular who had only just wandered in. But then he stumbled up to the stage, so fast that we couldn’t stop him, and sat down at the piano and played. We quieted immediately.

It was like lightning coming out of his fingertips. His eyes were closed and he improvised alone for a few moments before a drummer joined in, then the bass. Then he sang in a voice soaked in blues and smoke. Everyone in the bar was silent, unprepared to hear such glory after a few sets of college students trying out their new compositions on the stage. The bartender laughed at my surprised face.

“He’s a legend,” she said, so cool, like she’d revealed it to a million open-mouthed onlookers before. She probably had. “Look him up.”

The next morning, after getting home at sunrise, I did. Reeling like the whole night had been a dream, feeling like I wanted to stay in that basement club forever, I read everything I could about Mr. Johnny O’Neal and watched YouTube videos of him performing. I couldn’t get enough, feeling like the magic was corroborated because I could revisit a piece of it anytime I wanted. I was under a spell. I wanted to hear it all again. So I dragged myself to the bar the next week at 1 a.m. And the week after that and the week after that.

I just kept going back. It felt good to have this world to escape to on weeknights. When the city was mostly asleep but the stage felt so awake and new. It wasn’t a secret because I had something to hide. It was a secret because I just really needed something that belonged only to me. The habit caught me at a weird impasse in my life when I was always working late and trying to figure out who I could be each day. I always had stories for my friends about the long jazzy nights, but I would keep some details to myself, saving cherry pits of my memories to relive with my headphones on the train.

There were so many nights in that cellar that wadded up my life and made the city shine for me. I was lucky enough to catch more of the legendary Mr. O’Neal, along with so many other brilliant and mythical performers. I met strangers I could count on. Every song was somehow the best one I’d ever heard. There were regular characters who seemed intimidating and were only ever kind.

The jazz did something to my brain. I leaned on myself and started saying yes to every funny thing. I had soup next door with a doctor named after a Greek god. A French drummer and I sang karaoke with an off-broadway cast. The bartender who laughed at my surprise became my friend, a fountain of kindness and the best gossip and trashy romance novels. I met musicians I learned to avoid and became someone I recognized, ordering a glass of red wine and changing seats in between sets. I asked for song titles and origin stories and recommendations. I gave up on being embarrassed. During the daytime, I tried to catch glimpses of the girl I remembered from the night before in the sunlight.

My dream world ended just a few months after it began. I saw something I shouldn’t have. The bubble burst in an instant and I got scared. I left without telling anyone, slipping up the stairs and calling a car. It was a long time before I went back. It’s part of the story, an undeniable truth of so many secrets we carry: It couldn’t last and maybe that’s why it felt so perfect. I think part of me will be there forever.

Our inner worlds are utterly incomprehensible without leaving pieces of ourselves behind to revisit. New York has a tendency to make you a historian of your own patterns. You’ll learn to retrace your steps and figure out who you were becoming when you weren’t paying attention.

The last time I went to Smalls was with my friend, months after that night when I left without saying goodbye. It felt different. I barely recognized anyone in the room. They had changed some of the lights and the place was full of people who had seen a TikTok about it. I knew that what I left there was over but perfectly preserved. An outdated version of myself forever sitting in the bar I used to know. On the way home, I played Chet Baker and felt that warm, dizzy feeling again.

I started working during the daytime again a few weeks later. I couldn’t go back to Smalls even if I wanted to. I reached an understanding with my secret nights. I’d let them go and in turn, they would live forever. I might never betray some of the stories from those months, but I still listen to songs I heard there first all the time. I’ll never forget how it felt to have a hiding place where I could pretend I knew what I wanted.

In the end, the whole affair just taught me more about a full and hungry life in a greedy, tilting city. And maybe it would mean something to someone elsewhere but I just can’t see it like that. I’m selfish and four years feels like a long time to be in love this way.

This is what I’ve learned about New York. You will have years where everything you touch turns into secrets. You’ll keep parts of the city to yourself. You go to the jazz bar late at night. You excuse yourself to Google people you just met in restaurant bathrooms. You take your visiting friends to a garden and walk past a bench you almost died on, but you hold the story to your chest because it’s hard to explain how a knife can twist in a public green space.

Then you don’t tell anyone about an old lady who danced for you on a rooftop, even though it might have been a funny story. You can save some laughing for yourself. You’ll remember her years later when that song plays in an Uber and you’ll cry because you want to laugh in secret again but forgot how. You’ll remember again the next morning after your favorite cup of coffee. A secret can be a fickle overreaction.

But you’ll cry in stairwells, too. You’ll whisper in bookstores and get in trouble. You will run out of ideas and hide bodega cups with craft store feathers in them under your bed. You’ll call it magic. You’ll call for help. The city will wear you down.

The walks you take at night will belong only to you. There is so much to see that you never get tired. There is so much to write that you never get it all down. And when you finally sleep, you’ll wake up when the radiator clicks on and your room’s too bright but it’s New York so it’s all soaked anyways in something that burns like impulse and looks a lot like love. And everything is supposed to happen exactly like this. And one morning, on an inevitable spring day, you’ll give up the bar and keep the jazz and spill your guts.

Maybe it’s all a way of holding out, the secret to being in love for so long and still carrying hope in horrible weeks like these. Showing attention to whatever makes you feel brave, especially when no one is looking. Letting things belong to you and being unafraid to let them go.

You can build a habit to find the part of yourself that cares. You can keep a secret just for fun. You should go to Smalls sometime and sit in the back.

FIVE THINGS I’VE CONSUMED LATELY

1. The lemon potatoes at Kiki’s

2. I finished reading Wuthering Heights a few weeks ago and have returned to Anne Carson’s The Glass Essay multiple times since just to rub some salt in the wound

3. Heavy Metal by Cameron Winter but mostly the song “Love Takes Miles” when he sings “You left me promising your shoes” in the second verse it makes me feel like sliding down a wall for some reason

4. I just keep quoting this video of David Lynch RIP to the greatest

5. Brenda Song and Macaulay Culkin are so cute

Please respond and tell me about your secrets. Thanks for reading!

C

Happy New Year’s Eve!

At the beginning of this year, I set out with a resolution of being more intentional about my patterns. To me, the best way to do this was to keep extensive records. I wanted to know everything that happened to me and why. I made spreadsheets for bruises on my legs and places where I cried in public. I kept bulleted lists of the articles I read and songs I liked. I had these fragmented notes and opinions on my laptop, phone, and desk, and felt very serious about them like I was conducting a legitimate science experiment.

It worked, for the most part, when it came to my taste. There was a specificity I was seeking in my routines that I finally landed on, and I’m leaving 2024 with a better understanding of the things I like and why I reach for them.

But toward the end of the year, I started to feel that through all the clarity I gained by consuming, I had somehow missed pieces of myself in all these lists. It even feels strange to write out because I’ve always been so preoccupied with my feelings. But I treated my routines and obsessions like the end of the story, forgetting to leave room to look for the truth they could bring — not just about the world, but about myself, too.

In an interview about his movie The Worst Person in the World (one of my favorite first watches of the year) director Joachim Trier referenced the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard and said we can only make sense of our lives from wherever we stand.

We can only understand our life backwards, but we’re forced to live it forwards. And I think that’s the confusion we all feel, is that we always learn too late. We go through things that are completely inexplicable and mysterious. And then years later, we realize.

This lesson landed in a sore spot for me. I don’t want to realize anything too late! It’s so unlike me! I had been organizing all of these frivolous things and skipping the meaning. I ended up more confused and frustrated with myself for logging everything and somehow mulling over nothing, always moving on to the next big idea. Feeling so deeply is my greatest strength and my worst blind spot because I really had just assumed the sentimentality would come later, whether I looked for it or not.

It’s a beautiful, shifty way of getting to know yourself, piecing your life together like this. You really can only figure out everything backward. My new resolution is learning how to do it better.

I want to be more present this year and tend to my memory like a garden. To have these fragments is a gift, not just a tool or a lens. I want to remember to feel through things on my own time and not run from anything — not the past or the old aches or the mirrors I find in things I love. I’m hoping to assign meaning after feeling, standing in every corner and reaching for what I want. Taste is a reflection of weakness and funniness, too, and there’s no use in not being eager about it.

So maybe 2025 is the year I get over myself! I want to be present and unafraid. I also want to get into hiking and order more appetizers at restaurants. What are your resolutions? I’d love to hear them!

Below is my year in review. I listened to so much pop music! I laughed at so many movies! Please let me know if you loved or hated any of these things:

ALBUMS

1. Two Star and the Dream Police by Mk.gee

   I know this was everyone’s favorite album this year, but there’s a reason for that — it’s really great! Every song sounds almost like something you’ve heard before, but then he pulls the rug out from under you with every mean lyric or fuzzy guitar riff or shriek. It’s so scratchy and inescapable, I kept having this image of unearthing a new piece of a twinkly city every time I played the album in full this year. And I played it a lot! I kept coming back to these scattered ideas of wanting something so badly that it forces you into a messy and honest corner. He shoots straight through the heart with “You’re not a poet, you’re a liar” in “Alesis” and then turns it on himself immediately with “I’m not a liar, I’m just high.” He can’t help but fall short in “I Want,” my favorite from the album, admitting, “I’m not your hero but I got his desire.” It’s cluttered and shiny and he’s not afraid of overdoing it. I saw him at Terminal 5 in September and he played “DNM” five times throughout the night under the venue’s giant disco ball. He kept teasing the audience and pretending he was gearing up to play something else before the song’s unmistakable intro started, prompting cheers each time. It felt like we were all in on the joke, and listening to this record still feels like I’m laughing at a chaotic, glittering party where we’re all trying to figure out what could follow sincerity like this.

2. Manning Fireworks by MJ Lenderman

3. Going Nowhere by Quiet Light

   This album really put me in a trance in late November. The first song on the album, “Blood Pours Like Wine,” immediately hooked me. I was walking to meet my friend for dinner when I first heard it and I got there late because I kept having to stop on the sidewalk and look at the lyrics, hand over my heart, gasping, it just sounded so sharp and sad. In the next song on the album, she asks, “Does it kill you that I can’t get it right?” over a sliding, bright chorus. Each song is a specific dagger washing over the last. It’s a sugary gut punch of a record that only lasts 24 minutes but takes you all over the place.

4. Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat by Charli XCX

5. Diamond Jubilee by Cindy Lee

6. Fabiana Palladino by Fabiana Palladino

7. Bright Future by Adrianne Lenkar

8. Tigers Blood by Waxahatchee

9. What a Devastating Turn of Events by Rachel Chinouriri

10. Life Is by Jessica Pratt

11. Ten Total by 1010benja

    I’d rather be weirded out by 1010benja than bored elsewhere. Here’s an interview with him by Grant Sharples that I liked!

12. The Past is Still Alive by Hurray for the Riff Raff

SONGS

1. Right Back To It by Waxahatchee featuring MJ Lenderman

   This song soundtracked my entire year after it dropped in early January. The harmonies scratch an itch in my brain, especially when Jake’s voice breaks through on that high note in the chorus. The sweet familiarity of the song is like singing in the car with someone you love. Instant classic.

2. Docket by Blondshell and Bully

   This was my top-played song on Spotify this year. I wrote about Blondshell’s self-aware lyrics last year and this song has the same witty dryness that I love. And it’s so fun to sing with my beautiful roommate Emma!

3. Wristwatch by MJ Lenderman

4. Rockman by Mk.gee

   “Wherever you are, I want it on fire” is a perfect lyric to me.

5. Speyside by Bon Iver

6. Losing Tennessee by Fine

7. She’s Leaving You by MJ Lenderman

   It’s true, three MJ Lenderman songs mentioned… He’s got the sauce!

8. Fool by Adrianne Lenkar

9. We can’t be friends by Ariana Grande. Duh!

10. Kitchen by SZA

Here’s an unordered playlist of my favorite songs of the year:

MOVIES

1. Nickel Boys

2. La Chimera

3. I Saw The TV Glow

4. The Substance

5. Problemista

6. Challengers

7. Sing Sing

8. Dune: Part Two

9. Conclave

HARDEST I LAUGHED IN THEATERS WITH MY FRIENDS

1. Argylle

2. Madame Web

3. Megalopolis

4. Wicked

FIRST WATCHES

1. 3 Women (1977)

2. Broadcast News (1987)

3. Before Sunset (2004)

4. Brief Encounter (1945)

5. The Worst Person in the World (2021)

6. The Daytrippers (1997)

7. Reality Bites (1994)

8. Perfect Blue (1997)

9. Sisters (1972)

OTHER THINGS I LOVED

• Amanda Petrusich’s interview with Justin Vernon

• Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti

• When Meryl Streep came on stage during Joni Jam at the Hollywood Bowl in October

• Stereophonic and Job were the best plays I saw this year!

• Doechii’s tiny desk

• The shirts that people made about New York’s earthquake in April

• Haley Heynderickx at Baby’s All Right in June

• Contributing to Leonor’s perfect zine the Graveyard Review

• Jeremy Strong and Victoria Pedretti and Michael Imperioli in An Enemy of the People

• When Michael Imperioli revealed to me and Kaite outside of the play that he was also reading Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries

• I was obsessed with making vinaigrettes this year

• Rayne Fisher Quann’s essay Against Narrative

• The Bird’s Nest by Shirley Jackson

• Celebrity lookalike contests (they never got old for me)

• Chanel Beads opening for ML Buch at Elsewhere this summer

• These cookies

• Katie Crutchfield’s Substack

• Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo’s press tour for Wicked

• When the Today Show gave pickles to Peter Sarsgaard

• Mikey Madison’s hair tinsel in Anora

• I’m finally developing a taste for salmon

• Sabrina Carpenter’s whole thing!

• Timothee Chalamet and Nardwuar

• Club Chalamet turning into a Bob Dylan fan account

• The TikToks people make to That’s So True by Gracie Abrams

And I would love to give a special and gracious shoutout to how my hair looked after I ran the Brooklyn Half Marathon in April:

Finally, thank you for reading this year! I started this Substack in 2021 after an email chain to my friends got too crowded. I think we have a good thing going and I am so grateful to anyone who reads what I write. I can’t wait to give you more next year! Happy 2025!

Love,

C

Hi,

This is the second part of my essay series on Joni Mitchell and Graham Nash’s relationship. You can read the first part here.

How much of yourself can you give another person? I mean really give, like handing over and letting go with an open fist. How much do you want to?

I’m 25 now and mostly all of my friends are in long-term relationships, which comes with the territory of growing up and loving so many along the way. It feels like a prize, watching people I treasure learn important and beautiful things about themselves and the world through their love. So many weddings have brought some of the best nights of my life, laughing and dancing and crying over these love stories I’ve been lucky enough to watch from front-row seats. At two of my best friends’ weddings, I’ve given speeches about watching my soulmates fall in love with their own soulmates and changing for the better because of it.

I felt like an oracle sharing those speeches because I’d witnessed something divine and had to announce it to the masses. Loving people so deeply makes you an expert on their patterns, and gives you authority and access to their truth by observation, whether you say it out loud or not.

Through the true love I’ve seen and by my own failures, I’ve observed a common landing mark: a point in a romance, past the point of counting the number of dates, where you start to hand pieces of yourself over to one another. I’m not talking about anything physical or a transactional thing, it’s harder to catch than that.

The asking point comes in between the honeymoon shininess of something new and the point where it becomes natural to settle into a life together. You start to let them carry parts of you. Suddenly this person catches glimpses of your routines and your secrets and the way houses from your childhood show up in your dreams.

If the exchange is done right, it looks like holding things together, lightening the load, now everything is easy because of you. This is what I mean by giving yourself to another person, and it always looks so beautiful on my friends, like they come home lighter and more sure of themselves.

But the handover has never been easy on me. On me, it looks like botched surrender, skipping the altruistic or romantic way home and becoming an excuse to fight for control. It begins a self-destructive, optimistic attempt to know everything you want to save for yourself and still keep the shininess. An impossible task for love that requires sacrifice.

In A Lover’s Discourse, Roland Barthes calls affliction via desire a “cry of love,” an attempt to define oneself. “I want to understand myself, to make myself understood, make myself known, be embraced; I want someone to take me with him.” It’s why we do it all, to reach for the puddled, sometimes better version of yourself you see in someone else’s gaze. But I somehow can’t reach for this understanding and still cling to the things I want. I only have so many hands. I end up skipping past finding meaning through that beautiful compromise and instead, give my time and sanity to decaying bouquets of a feeling that still looks fresh.

Joni felt this conflict of surrender too, trying to figure herself out through a watered-down love in Laurel Canyon. But like I said, loving starts easily! You want the rotting flowers to be real, so you buy a vase for them.

It was a California tipping point, with Hollywood oversaturated and violence overwhelming, and Joni made a blind promise of comfort on the very first night Graham arrived in Los Angeles. “Come to my house and I’ll take care of you.”

This started their sun-soaked life together at Joni’s house at 8217 Lookout Mountain, which she bought in spring of 1968 with the royalties from her debut album Song to a Seagull. It was a sanctuary with wood panels, a fireplace, and a garden in the yard. She kept a collection of glass trinkets and a giant piano in the living room. They lived a dreamy few months there, sharing coffee in the mornings and reading together in the living room at night.

Graham wrote “Our House” after breakfast in town one day, when Joni bought a vase on the way home. When they arrived back at the house, Graham lit a fire while she picked flowers in the yard for the vase. He then sat down to immortalize their life together with the lullaby-like song:

Our house is a very, very, very fine house
With two cats in the yard, life used to be so hard
Now everything is easy 'cause of you.

There’s a lot to say about the domestic bliss that learns to breathe when you’re in love. The sweetness of a warm bed is impossible to overlook, a shared meal can be divine. It’s rose-colored glasses in tandem, creating these cozy nesting patterns and leaving little room for division. Love is a long-form magic trick utilized by generations before us to make these secret worlds where every chore is fun and nothing else matters. It’s why going to the grocery store with your crush is the most fun ever invented, and why you remember how they take their coffee long after they leave. In Portrait of a Lady on Fire, she asks, do all lovers feel like they’re inventing something? Love by renewal, all these things I’ve done alone can be yours too. But the warmth can disappear in an instant.

Joni began to surrender her reality when the honeymoon reared its sacrificial head, trapped in this canyon paradise with a man who couldn’t wrap his mind around her. She had already been married once and didn’t want to settle down again out of fear it would ruin her creativity. He kept raising the question anyway, and she adored him still, calling him “my old man” and writing a song with that same title about how they didn’t need a marriage certificate to prove their love (so funny and backhanded of her). He felt insecure and jealous, he confessed years later, of her songwriting. They argued over their futures and their music and their time.

A poem I love by Joe Wenderoth goes, “I love you, even if you don’t understand me, even if you burn my attempts to reach you, even if you are no one, nowhere. After all, I warm my hands by the same fires.” I think it’s something like that. Both fueled by a parting domestic dream, she loved him as she pulled away for the reasons he crowded and settled in. It didn’t matter what they set out to share.

In “My Old Man,” Joni also confessed her loneliness as part of why she wanted Graham around, to keep away her blues. But eventually, she ran into herself, finding she’d rather feel alone than weak or stifled or crazy. She shared the beginning of her doubts about their relationship in her song “Willy,” blatantly dedicated to Graham with the title being one of his nicknames:

But you know it's hard to tell
When you're in the spell if it's wrong or if it's real

Comfort can pull the wool over your eyes with one hand while the other still sits in yours. You wake up one day and find him already at the piano when you wanted to sit down and play. You snap out of your paradise spell of stained glass and two cats in the yard and recall your genius, and the life you dreamed before the half-empty assurance of a shared home. You remember the daughter you didn’t keep and the records you planned to make. You find that you liked being by yourself in that Laurel Canyon house, too. There were nights when you danced in the kitchen alone and didn’t have to explain anything to anyone.

I’m not just speculating about them arguing over space. Graham often joked about how they raced to the piano in the mornings, but I somehow don’t think the fight was ever funny to Joni. He also eventually spoke about another fight they had, which proved the dysfunctional surrender to me the most, because I read the story and recognized myself with a jolt. The years really do soften every blow, but Graham telling this story with a laugh decades later can’t convince me of its humor:

At the close of their relationship, Joni joined Graham on Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young’s European tour. They were arguing constantly. One night, the pair got into it after the band made some brash remarks onstage in Sweden. Things escalated until Joni poured a bowl of cornflakes with milk over Graham’s head. As the story goes, the two stared at each other in silence and disbelief before Graham ordered the hotel maid to leave the room and then “put Joni over his knee and spanked her.”

You read that right! It is so insane and humiliating and weird! And from my perspective, it must have been the nail in the coffin. It’s like she woke up; it’s like he snapped. The relationship ended weeks later, while Joni traveled alone throughout Europe and stopped in Crete. As you know. As the story was set for us.

Maybe the sacrifice required in true, healthy romance comes naturally if it’s right. And maybe sometimes relationships implode because your instinct intervenes. Graham told Joni he loved her and didn’t want to hold her down, but he was just a few arguments out from hitting her. The sunny days in Laurel Canyon couldn’t outshine his temper or her brilliance or the fact that it was her money that bought the house in the first place.

In 2018, Graham sang “Our House” at Joni’s 75th Birthday Celebration at the piano. He kept his introduction brief, saying they wrote it together when she was 26 and he was 27. The crowd sang along loudly and beautifully, creating a new home for the song — one that’s outlived creative jealousy and cereal milk over Graham’s head.

How it ends doesn’t have to be how it’s remembered, meaning time has a tendency to smooth every crease. The sweetness in that Laurel Canyon house is what Joni and Graham both still talk about decades after their end. The memory of togetherness prevails past an irreversibly mean night.

Celine tells Jesse in Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise that God exists in the little spaces between two people. “If there's any kind of magic in this world it must be in the attempt of understanding someone sharing something. I know, it's almost impossible to succeed, but who cares really? The answer must be in the attempt.”

It’s the attempt. The honeymoon that haunts the ending. No matter the things you give or forgive, the promises you go back on, or the harshness you allow. In all my witness to big loves and bad lovers alike, I still think the crashing and burning is worth it for the magic in the space between. The ways we hurt and control and reach to understand ourselves and each other can build a home out of meaning as earned as a happy ending. We move past a fantasy for the sake of something real, whether or not the ending is what we had in mind. In the end, we warm our hands by the same fires.

THINGS I’VE CONSUMED LATELY

1. So much goat cheese it’s crazy

2. Patrick Fealey’s crushing article in Esquire

3. I’ve been loving the Transa album

4. Noah and Sean’s friendsgiving name being “A Turkey Brines in Brooklyn” has made me laugh every time I’ve thought about it

5. Before Midnight (2013) no questions at this time please

If you’ve made it this far, THANK YOU for reading! And please send me your Spotify wrapped!

C

Hi,

I want to give you something weird and long that started with this song, Simple Man by Graham Nash.

I’ve been talking about this to anyone who will listen for the past six months — over the phone, in bars, cross-legged on my roommate’s bed, I keep coming to these conclusions over and over again and I wanted to write it all down and share it with you. 

At first, I wanted to send you this longwinded, sort of journalistic account so you could know me better, as someone who sneaks into your inbox a few times a year and is obsessed with stories like these. Then I thought it could be useful for whoever is reading this to know yourself better, as someone who I trust is interested in love and power and control. Because we all are! But really, I don’t need to afford a reason to share this with you. I just don’t want to keep it to myself anymore. It’s about Joni Mitchell and Graham Nash.

PART ONE

Joni Mitchell and Graham Nash’s story began at a Hollies show in Canada. They spent one impossible night together and moved on with their lives. They met a few more times casually until at a party months later when Joni supposedly went up to Graham and said, “Come to my house and I’ll take care of you.” He couldn’t refuse, and then they were together for good.

The two dated while they were both becoming who we know them to be now. “Our House” is inspired by their time as lovers in Joni’s house in Laurel Canyon. In the demo of the song, you can hear Joni laugh when Graham misses a note on the piano.

It took two years together for Joni to stop laughing at his mistakes and start counting them instead. In 1970, from her travels in Europe, she sent him the breakup telegraph heard around the world —  postmarked to his door in a frenzy of clarity that burns through the screen, reblogged decades later on Tumblr by teenagers burning in a more confused way. The magnitude of the infamous breakup letter still stands:

If you hold sand too tightly in your hand it will run through your fingers. Love, Joan.

On the day he received the message, Graham wrote Simple Man, which is on his 1971 album Songs for Beginners. He’s since admitted that most of the sad songs on that album are about Joni. Because of course they are! 

Matching its name, Simple Man is an uncomplicated ballad with two verses and two choruses. The song’s context is more interesting than the tune itself. There’s some fiddle, harmonica, and backing vocals in most versions, and the live recording from 1977 is the superior one because of how he wails in the second verse. 

In the plain production, you can almost hear him apologizing as he explains himself in the way only a desperate man can. Like a promise exploding in an empty hall, the chorus is pleading and kind:

I just want to hold you
I don’t want to hold you down
I hear what you’re saying 
And you’re spinning my head around
And I can’t make it alone

Graham said in his autobiography that he wrote the chorus first upon realizing that he couldn’t match Joni — he calls her Joan like her god-given name, like he knew her better, like she signed the breakup letter — in complexity.

“I came up with those lines first and put them together using the idea that my approach to love – and life, in general – is a simple one,” he wrote.

“I wasn’t the same kind of deep thinker that Joan was. Even though I’d spent years educating myself about photography, politics, beat poetry, art in general, and, well, the world at large, when you scratch the surface I’m a pretty simple man. It’s most obvious in my music.”

Even put as gently as that, the chorus of this song still spells out a terribly sad sentiment to me, to think that he couldn’t wrap his head around her and it made him reach to pull her closer. To want someone plainly and still know it’s not right. 

Loving starts so easily, before the nuance and expectation and fiddle play along. Water rushing in, verse leading to chorus, there’s a natural sense to falling in love that seeks to override the things you know you can’t outrun forever. You can’t escape your own manner — but you want to! So you hold her anyway.

Remember when I told you that Graham wrote Simple Man on the day they broke up? When he later finished the song, he performed it for the first time on the opening night of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s five-night stand at the Fillmore East in the East Village (Which is an Apple Bank now. What happened to landmarks?) 

Graham didn’t know it until he took the stage, but Joni was in the audience. 

“I decided to sing it even though I’d just written it,” He recalled the show to People in 2018.

“I look up and there’s Joni sitting in the third row. I got through it and managed to sing the song, but it was weird because we’d just broken up and that’s always a weird time.”

I can’t help but think of how she felt, hearing the chorus for the first time in the music hall. I wonder if she kept it cool. I imagine her stomach dropped. I wonder if she felt vindicated in her decision, to hear him confess that he wants to hold her even after she told him that she felt like sand running through his fingers.

When I first sent a draft of this email to my friend in the spring, with too much eagerness and a silo already full of footnotes, she kindly responded with surprise that I hadn’t directly related this story to my own breakup.

Which one? I wanted to joke but didn’t. I felt buzzed by the feedback like I had hit my funny bone. Where did you get that idea? While reading this, was it so impossible to believe this story could ensnare me without ever being mine? Does my own heartbreak fit between each line or do I have to spell out the way I recognize the verse? Can you not hear me laughing in the piano demo? 

Backward and around again, we know both endings by heart. I’ve been the lover who holds too tight and I’ve been the sand. I’ve clung to people who were never meant for me and carried things I could only dream of understanding. I am a broken hourglass filling up the hallway and running down the stairs. Sometimes you walk away only to end up in the third row at his show.

I am a simple man
So I sing a simple song
Never been so much in love
And never hurt so bad at the same time

There’s even more to say here, a story bigger than heartbreak and sand that’s insistent on patterns and age and discipline. Running into yourself and the things you deserve. But I wanted to tell you about the breakup first, so you know how the story was set for me. The song and the note caught on to me like a stray nail on a staircase and everything since then has really unraveled me down to ribbons or guts, to know that I can see myself more clearly because of these things that happened 50 years ago. It’s still happening now. Isn’t that what art is for? Undoing you, snagging your own experience and tune, outside of memory and time? I’ll see you soon for part two!

THINGS I’VE CONSUMED LATELY

1. This banana split with Emily at Three Decker Diner in Greenpoint

   

2. I devoured Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik, felt gross after, and immediately administered a reread of On Self-Respect

3. Wicked :) in 3D which was jarring

4. Last week, I saw Sun Dogs at BAM, which paired filmmakers and composers to create short films that played while a live orchestra performed. My favorite of the three films was Josephine Decker’s (I loved Shirley in 2020) called Rise, Again, composed by Daniel Wohl and Arooj Aftab (whose album from earlier this year I really liked)

5. The How Long Gone episode with Father John Misty made me laugh out loud on the train multiple times

6. Loved this piece “do we ever get over things?” by Ava Huang (I really recommend subscribing to Bookbear Express)

7. Here is my patchwork winter playlist

   Thanks for reading! Love you!

   C

I turn 25 tomorrow!

The last time my birthday was on a Saturday was when I turned 20 in 2019. I had just returned from two weeks in Colombia and a week in Ecuador where I was taking Spanish literature classes with a group from college. I couldn’t stop crying when I got back. I missed the beautiful places I had seen and my friends from the trip, but I mostly missed feeling like I knew what I was doing. I had been there to learn something so specific, and for such a short time, that I felt like I had been exploding in one good direction for a month only to land in Ohio listless and different. 

The month had changed me. Staying in Quito was my first time alone in a walkable city. I felt like I could see exactly what I wanted on every foggy mountaintop. We read Love in the Time of Cholera and argued in class about how love can infiltrate like a disease. The old woman I stayed with in Ibague prayed for our protection every morning over Vienna sausages and burnt coffee. I believed her prayers and told my friends I was over my last breakup, calling it “la ruptura” to them but writing “la separación” in my journal. I couldn’t stop having dreams about cathedrals.

That June of 2019, I only had two songs downloaded on my phone to listen to whenever we didn’t have WiFi, mostly while traveling by bus to the cities we would walk through. I had opportunities to download more, but knew that I would later thank myself for picking two songs to wrap my trip in. The decisive, world-stop songs I chose to baptize my bus rides and morning taxis with were Bags by Clairo, which had just dropped before her debut album Immunity came out later that summer, and My Baby Don’t Understand Me by Natalie Prass.

The Bags choice backfired almost immediately because its cultural impact in the circles I run in cannot be overstated (literally walking out the door with your bags) but the Natalie Prass one still brings me back to my trip every time I hear her breath punctuate the beginning of the song. I don’t know exactly why I picked it — it’s not really a casual listening experience like Bags and it was already a few years old when I fixated on it. It was probably something to do with my heartbreak, almost definitely something to do with the horns in the chorus. “I don’t feel much, afraid I don’t feel anything at all,” was a lyric I felt drawn to, ironically, while I was coming down from months of feeling probably more than I ever had. 19 had left me bruised and at the edge of the ring, afraid of how the next year could hurt me.

On my 20th birthday, I went to see Ma (a perfect movie) in theaters with Kellie. We met at the theater and I cried for the millionth and last time that day pulling into the parking lot during golden hour. Firstly because I remembered golden hour in Cartagena, and secondly because I was listening to Strangest Thing by The War on Drugs. (Did you ever think you would see Ma and The War on Drugs referenced in the same paragraph?)

It’s a song about being on the edge of your life and wanting to change. Adam Granduciel sings about living between beauty and pain before deciding to “let it turn into you into love again.” I had been rocketing between beauty and pain, cathedrals and college, love and disease, when this song washed over me with the golden hour light and a special second-decade permission to love it all again anyway. And then I did!

I remember my 20th so well, despite my horrific memory and the lengths I’ve gone to forget almost all of 2019, because of the songs that soundtracked those weeks. I’ve always felt meticulous about the company I keep with music. Albums turn into scrapbooks so easily! Every song is a pushpin, each playlist a stake in the ground to say I was here and felt something. So by way of song, here is a time capsule for what 25 is looking like on the night before my birthday.

I Feel Like Giving You Things - ML Buch

I saw ML Buch at Elsewhere last weekend and it was one of the best shows I’ve been to in my whole life. It felt like she was building a sculpture on stage in front of us. She started the set off with this song in almost total darkness. I love how she describes the beautiful things she lists and it’s inspired me to jot down so many notes of gratitude lately.

Envy - Gracie Gray

This song gets stuck in my head multiple times a day. It’s a song that makes you feel like you’re driving. I can’t make out a lot of these lyrics if I’m being honest, but I love how it feels all the same. Green, green envy! It all started cause of you!

Major Leagues - Pavement 

This is the best song to listen to when you’re going through anything at all. It’s kept me resilient for years. It works better each time you listen to it if you remember what you were up against the last time you heard it. I always steel myself, I always get through! (Maybe a lesson to keep in mind for 25)

Can We Still Be Friends? - Todd Rundgren

I have been listening to this song after the end of a complex years-long relationship in my life came about for good a few weeks ago. It’s a silly anthem from the 70s, it was in Dumb and Dumber in 1994, but it’s so good to stomp to when you’re marching around the city now. I was listening to it (and the version with Daryl Hall) and walking around Central Park after work the other day, thinking about this bizarre and nuanced friendship and about how this song makes me feel bad for the singer. I sat on a bench and wrote down something long about breathing and weakness that I’ll probably share one day! 

The girl, so confusing version with lorde - Charli xcx

My friends and I went to Rockaway Beach on the day that BRAT dropped. We listened to it fully and only paused once to dip in the water when the sun was unbearable. It was a glorious day. I got sunburnt, we drank piña coladas, and I came home and pored over Meaghan Garvey’s perfect review of the album for Pitchfork.

When Charli announced this remix with Lorde, I was on my lunch break at work and came back inside to break the news to my coworkers like Paul Revere.

I had my hand clapped over my mouth for all of Lorde’s verse when I first listened. I know how it feels to be on both sides of a friendship like that. I can’t believe they did it and I love it!

Here is a playlist I made with these five songs and some other ones I love lately. The playlist picture is of a man I saw sunbathing in Bryant Park. I don’t normally take pictures of strangers and think it’s weird to do so, but I was sitting in the same area of chairs as him and looking at the sun just like that. When I put my head down, it made me emotional to see him in the same posture for some reason. We were the only two people in those seats. He turned his head and we smiled at each other and then he went back to sunbathing. I took that picture to remember him.

Thanks for reading my selfish little time capsule. I would love to hear some songs that have been creating memories for you lately! And send me some birthday wishes too!

FIVE THINGS I’VE CONSUMED LATELY

1. Emily Wilson’s essay about Anne Carson in The Nation

2. Salami sandwich at the Met Opera summer recital series. Both things were good

3. This was over a month ago but I saw Robert Altman’s 3 Women at the Metrograph and have thought/read/talked about it every other day since. BAM is also showing it next week!

4. This cake Callie made with stonefruit on top

   

    

5. Patti Smith sang Summertime Sadness

Send me some songs! Love you!

C