On Sunday at 3pm, I’m pulling hair out of my shower drain. It’s been cloudy today, and I’m crying sort of passively, not because of the hair or the weather, but the song I keep replaying, over and over, Stick Season by Noah Kahan. This continues on and off into the evening, the song and the tears; my body is being reminded of all the memories I still grieve periodically, and feeling them again, differently. It’s a heartbreak song, full of honest pain; it’s about not having control over love, and the despair this engenders. It’s about the rawness of reckoning with the fact that nothing lasts forever. It’s the kind of song that demands to be experienced.
The first verse follows:
“As you promised me that I was more than all the miles combined // You must have had yourself a change of heart // Like halfway through the drive // 'Cause your voice trailed off exactly as you passed my exit sign // Kept on driving straight and left our future to the right”
The seeming arbitrariness of continuing to drive straight instead of turning right reflects the seeming arbitrariness of almost everything. Sometimes, feelings just change. Sometimes people just die, or they leave, or your intuition leads you somewhere else. A lot of the time, shit just happens and you don’t really know why.
We don’t have control over who enters or exits our lives, and when. We don’t have control over who we love, or if they love us back in the ways we want them to. And thank goodness, right, because love does not involve control. But we are only human, and the desire to control is natural. Especially when we are hurting, we spend so much time wishing that something or someone were different. Our minds buy into the illusion that we know what should happen and how to make it so. I think it’s just because it’s scary, to not know what’s coming next. I think we all live, to some extent, with the latent awareness that at any moment, something completely unexpected could happen, and we have absolutely no say in it. We don’t really know what lies ahead, and we can’t.
But, letting go of the illusion of control might be what saves us from our mental angst: it might be that giving up on the idea that we can orchestrate what we think we want to happen is what frees us to love more deeply. It might be that relaxing our grip on pain and allowing grief to flood our systems is what lets us know that we can trust life to do the orchestrating, and trust ourselves to handle it. Maybe not pretending to have all the answers will allow the blanks to be filled in with what’s really supposed to be there.
. .
Life seems intent on me learning transitoriness: that nothing is permanent, and all of it will change. It feels like I’m constantly entering and exiting experiences I wish would last longer, and continuing to taste many flavors of love, just for a breath. It’s beautiful; it hurts.
So many people I have loved and thought I would always be close with have faded from the foreground. It’s not really up to me to determine who stays and who goes, or if I’m the one who stays or goes. I think I’m getting better at appreciating people and experiences for who and what they are, without wishing they were different. I’m learning to hold everything lightly, with an open palm.
These lyrics get me every time:
“I saw your mom and she forgot that I existed… // I’ll drink alcohol ‘til my friends come home for Christmas… // And I'll dream each night of some version of you // That I might not have, but I did not lose.”
Noah Kahan, Stick Season
Falling away from someone you used to know and love is a particularly hollow feeling, as is the ache of realizing you don’t really know them, anymore. But what you will keep are the memories, the blessing of the experience itself, and the growth that emerged from it.
May we love for the sake of loving; may we trust that the love itself is worthwhile.
. .
I guess it’s just a part of growing older, to confront the reality that people you love will leave your life. It’s hard. It hurts. I feel sort of heartbroken regularly, regardless of what’s going on in my life. Sometimes my heart just hurts. It’s the ache that comes and goes, and if I let it, one that takes me somewhere else I want to be.
When I feel this way, it’s like I’m pulling from some great collective pool of grief. It feels familiar, like something inside me is remembering what grief is. This idea comes in part from this conversation I listened to about love, death and grief, with Buddhist meditation teachers Tara Brach and Frank Ostaseski. Frank tells a story about supporting a young woman while she was dying: minutes before her father arrived to say goodbye, she passed. The father said, after a while, that the grief, which most would deem unimaginable, actually felt familiar—like it was coming from the same source he’d experienced before.
I think for as long as love can be unconditional, grief will also have to be.
I’m learning that to love means to accept. Love doesn’t involve manipulation, or attempts to change or control. To love means to let people be themselves, and experience the life that wants to be lived through them.
I’m learning that to love means to grieve, because there is so much we don’t get to choose. There is so much that hurts, and it hurts because there is love.
May we continue to feel all of the love and grief that comes our way. May we continue to love without expecting it in return—may we love for the sake of loving, wherever we dare, and let it take whatever form it is meant to take.
Maggie