Grief’s Playlist, by Jenny Bahn

Arcade Fire – The Suburbs

The room is filled with the noise of other people.  Expensive New Yorkers.  We lean in while our voices purr under the din, barely audible thanks to drunken women laughing and servers asking, “Care for anything else?”  It’s a Friday and I am getting drunk after a week of work I do not enjoy.  We drink champagne with vodka and it tastes like spoiled apple juice, bubbly and rotten.  He leans in to kiss me and we are kissing and I hear the chorus of the song and nothing else, everything drowned out by me and him and an album he has now ruined.

Wild Nothing – Chinatown

We say goodbye on a sidewalk the next morning.  He lives in Europe; his flight is that evening.  “It was nice to meet you,” I say, smiling at my casual farewell – as though we just met over coffee and had not spent the night together.  I leave him, not thinking anything can or will develop, despite his inexplicable enthusiasm for me.  “I think you’re the nicest person I think I’ve ever met,” he says.  “You’re hanging out with the wrong people,” is all I can think to respond.   He tries to give me money for a cab, which I push back into his hand.  I take the subway and get home, where I sit on my sofa, running the events of the last twenty-four hours over in my head.

Phantogram – You Are the Ocean

He has left for his life in Europe.  I continue my life in New York.  I walk down the streets, cold and boring and terribly gray.  I feel as though my world has expanded – it feels big and possible and I am waiting for something.  He asks me to see him in Paris.  I’ve known him less than twelve hours but I say yes.  It won’t occur to me that this is strange and impulsive until I am deboarding the plane, already on French soil.

Reading Rainbow – Wasting Time

But before Paris, before the flight: A storm is on the horizon, one that will blanket the city like it did in December, trapping people in and keeping others out.  For three days, I call American Airlines every hour, on the hour.  “Is there a travel advisory?” I ask, hoping some gracious man or woman will hear the panic in my voice and allow me to jump on an earlier flight, circumventing the very real possibility that my flight will be subject to extreme delay.  “How far away are you from the airport?” the man asks.  Within ten minutes, I have thrown five days worth of clothing into a rolling suitcase, remembering everything but a hairbrush. I get on an airplane a day early with only an hour to spare.

Toro y Moi – Still Sound

Paris is a blur of too much pink champagne and midnight rides in taxicabs.  I order food I don’t eat and have conversations with people who live in foreign countries.  I see him watch me as I speak.  He holds my hand underneath dinner tables and lends me a pair of gloves that I lose.

Beach House – Zebra

He leaves in the morning for work.  It is my last day in Paris and I have two hours before a taxi arrives, time enough for coffee and dwelling on the next ten days I have to go without seeing him.  My life feels like some ridiculous movie with a dramatic soundtrack and sweeping landscape shots taken from fast-moving cars.

Liam Finn – Gather to the Chapel

I am sitting in the uncomfortable seat of another airplane, coming back from Paris. I stare at the backs of chairs, despondent and missing him already.  I want to go back. I want to scream out “Bomb!” or “I’m having a massive, life-threatening panic attack.  We must go back at once!”  I watch our disproportionately large airplane make its way across an artistic rendering of the Atlantic Ocean – a giant, fumbling white tube with wings the size of the United States.  As the hours drag on, I watch as the coastline of Europe recedes from the tail of our fake plane until, at some point, I am further away from him than closer to.  I close my eyes and wait for New York.

Alexi Murdoch – Love You More

He tells me he’s falling in love with me.  It’s only been some number of days amounting to just over two weeks.  I freeze.  Girls warn you of boys like this – impulsive boys who make intense decisions they only end up regretting.  “I don’t know what to say,” I say, and he tells me it’s okay.  “I know how you feel,” he says.  “It shows.”  When I still can’t say it, I send him a song filled with lyrics that repeat all of the things I want to say but cannot, as though that will hold me less accountable than the things that would ordinarily come out of my own mouth.

Arcade Fire – Deep Blue

He’s back in New York for ten days.  He asks me to be his girlfriend.  Against my better judgment, I say yes.  “Can you find this song for me?” he asks, pulling my computer closer towards him.  He’s been listening to the album non-stop since December.  “This one reminds me of you.  It’s the one that makes me the most sad,” he says.  I’m not sure how to take this, but it seems as though it’s not a bad thing, in a masochistic, longing, romantic way, I suppose.

Jane’s Addiction – Jane Says

The radio in his hotel is set – permanently, it seems – to a station that plays only 90s rock.  Nirvana, Tom Petty, Pearl Jam.  We hear the same songs multiple times; it is a predictable playlist of the Top 100 angst-ridden grunge songs of our time. We take bets on how many times we will hear “Heart Shaped Box” before the day is through.  He is in the shower and I stare out at the rooftops of Manhattan. Perry Farrell sings about a girl who is hooked on drugs.  Jane says!  She’s done with Sergio!  Treats me like a ragdoll! I never get sick of this song, I can’t say why.  Something tells me that all of this – him and me and this hotel room – will just be a memory, brief as a song, indicative of a time in my life, stuck there forever and not finding its way into my future.

Radiohead – Lotus Flower

We fought.  “There’s always a fight on the last night,” he said, predicting our behavior according to that of his past experiences with women and distance.  “I don’t fight,” I said curtly over a glass of red wine, but I was lying.  The next day, I try to feel light and casual by acting accordingly.  I sit on the white duvet of the hotel bed, watching Thom York angle himself bizarrely against a black and white background.  I try to disappear into the song while he takes a shower, while he packs up his bags, while he makes preparations for leaving me.

James Blake – Lindisfarne II

He’s in Europe when he tells me he doesn’t have time for this.  “This” being me, the girl he had once so intensely pursued.  He calls me “amazing” and “wonderful” and other flowery adjectives that make me cringe, that make me want to be mean and nasty and terrible, that make me want to be one of those broken girls that boys want to fix.  I lie on the floor of my apartment for days, wishing there were leaves on the trees outside and heat coming through my windows to make my depressed state of mind more tolerable.

Rilo Kiley – Breakin’ Up

After two weeks of being totally bereft and pathetic, I have gone to Los Angeles to regroup, to see my friends, to remember what kind of person I am when I don’t allow myself to fall in love.  I swing violently from total empowerment to complete despair, from “Fuck you” to “I’m fucked.”  I sit in my mother’s backyard, watching my raw-chicken skin flush in the sun.  I feel the warmth on my face and feel myself waking up from a heartbreak-induced coma.

Rainbow Arabia – Mechanical

A week later, I’m back in New York, walking down my dead street, the window of the strange Polish woman still filled with Homer Simpson stickers, the pot in front still featuring fake flowers crammed into real dirt.  I am beginning to feel strong again, though the strength is accompanied by unintended side effects.  My bitterness is at an all-time high, my cynicism unparalleled.  I see a good-looking boy about my age walking toward me.  I stare at him directly.  I want to rip your fucking heart out, I think to myself.  Just let me.

Cults – You Know What I Mean

He writes me on my birthday.  He calls me “gorgeous” and signs it “yours sincerely.”  He seems normal.  I seem normal.  It all seems normal until I feel myself getting sucked back into him without the promise of an apology or a safety net.  He has contacted me under his terms and I feel my intolerance for him brewing.  He is being careless with the heart that I have so painstakingly glued back together.  I tell him I still feel the same and he says he didn’t mean anything by it.  “I just wanted to say happy birthday,” he says.  I feel myself shatter on the inside, brittle and jagged.  I sit through my birthday dinner, guzzling red wine and eating forkfuls of proscuitto and when I come home, emotionally exhausted by him all over again, I dance around in the darkness of my apartment, listening to a song on repeat, convinced I will probably be alone for the rest of my life, now by choice.

The Units – High Pressure Days (Rory Phillips Remix)

The song comes over the broken speakers in my friend’s living room.  Everyone is in the kitchen drinking, fortifying themselves for another Saturday night.  Jo and I dance in front of the television.  I throw my hands up in the air and breathe – feeling my feet stomp against the patterned rug, feeling any affection for him being consumed by an increasing dislike of him, feeling not the capacity to love, but certainly the capacity to live.