VIII: Sforzando | Silver-Tipped Swallow: "Clean Break"
I tried to stay gone. But leaving was too easy: like a third shot down a well-oiled throat in the new-toothed night, like slipping out of a stranger’s back door & into the open wound of a taxi at dawn. Maybe I should’ve guessed coming back would be even easier.
So the love songs weren’t about him. Okay. The love songs weren’t about him, but—he was gorgeous & full of life, he adored me & took me out to dinner & made me laugh & brought me on spontaneous cross-state road trips. I wasn’t unhappy.
Breaking up with him was almost ritual, an offering to hunger. Two in the morning, the winter of freshman year, over text message like a coward on the edge of nothing good. It wasn’t that I didn’t like him. & I needed him to know this wasn’t his fault. But the hours had grown long. I needed truer noise.
It says a lot, I think, how often the word need appeared in that text. My throat forced wide open, swallowing back my own stunning shame. That autumn I’d moved across the world, onto a campus oceans away from all I’d once known, but some things never changed: three dots at the bottom right of my phone screen quavering frenetic & fathomless, the bass pounding faster than a heart attack.
Finally came the reply. He understood. (Sudden letdown, but I, gut-instinct, slit its throat before it could raise its voice. Maybe there has always been a dark, ugly part of me that yearns for a fight. Or worse, that yearns to be something worth fighting for.) He just wanted me to be happy, which hurt like hell. But he begged to stay friends. I couldn’t, for his sake. The words clean break were used. As if breakage ever can be.
/
That spring the university shivered into its own breakage, open-mouthed scales of softness sliding into the cacophony of unfolding cardboard boxes. It’s a funny thing to feel loneliness so communally. When the school announced it was sending us home for the semester due to COVID, I couldn’t stop thinking about the hunger to which I’d succumbed when I’d sent that break-up text. I’d wanted something more, something he couldn’t give me, a song to singe a bared throat. I hadn’t thought I was asking for this.
At the last party of freshman year we tipped hours down our throats like wine. Some desperations defy words, so we turned to music: bass thrumming from the speakers, meaning I wasn’t ready to leave, not yet. Every song on the Spotify playlist marked explicit, meaning I wanted to live longer. Screaming the lyrics like immortality, meaning I was terrified, was ravenous, might never be full again. A girl I’d been flirting with throughout the semester showed up, & maybe I was expecting some grand end-of-the-world profession of love, but instead we just kissed, alcohol cradled between our tongues. It was enough. To come up breathing. Meaning what was there left to say?
My application to stay on campus was approved at the last moment. I unpacked as my friends drove away, unsure whether I’d been spared or damned. With only a few hundred others left on campus, I allowed myself my beastlike tendencies: no one else on my floor so I turned my music to the loudest volume. I missed the songs I had once claimed to hate, woke up thigh-deep in uncertainty & waded through it to my Zoom classes. It was here, months later, that he texted me again.
/
Maybe it’s frivolous to talk about love right now, but the note I’m really reaching for is this: I was lonely. I was touch-starved, & yes, I’ve been touch-starved most of my life, but stay with me, hear out this animal. I’d begun playing the playlist from the last party nonstop even though most pop music makes my head hurt, songs for flashing lights & bodies in the dark more than studying for finals & grocery shopping in a homemade mask. The incongruity felt fitting, an homage to that bright & blurry time before the crash.
I know I shouldn’t have texted him back. I promised myself we could just be friends. You’re laughing beneath the bassline but listen. I swear on the tender blue uncertainty kissing the inside of my thighs—I really believed it.
Neutral territory: how are you? He was okay, all things considered. Working extra shifts at the local hospital. Was I still in town? Was I stuck on campus, or was I driving yet? He’d promised to teach me one day—did I remember?
Just friends. No, driving still terrified me, glass-shard fear of a crash that I clung to as familiar, manageable, human. He said: when this is all over I’m making you drive. I said: in your dreams. He said: I liked it better when I was the tease. I said: I’m a fast learner. Was that flirting? That was friendly, right?
He missed me. He wanted to be friends. That was safe. I could do friends.
/
Clearly, I couldn’t do friends. I texted him near midnight, wine-tipsy & begging to be broken: you know I have to ask what made you reach out again. He was at the hospital—could he call me at the end of his shift? He knew I hated phone calls. Of course, I said. Ariana Grande was blaring from my speakers. I couldn’t stand Ariana Grande. I turned up the volume. As the wine soured in my throat I debated telling him I was going to bed. He was doing real work in the world; he didn’t need me as a distraction. How feral of me, to write the text with my finger hovering over send, knowing all the while I wouldn’t have the teeth.
Half an hour later he called me. Straight off the score: the months apart had taught him that I was the only one for him. You’re a hopeless romantic. Actually, he’d always been so logical in relationships. It was when he met me that that had gone out the window. I bet you say that to every girl that comes along. Never. He just didn’t want to lose me again. Why wasn’t I saying anything? I’m trying to figure out your deal. His deal was that he wanted me back. It’s past midnight. You need to be at work tomorrow. I—you should sleep. Nothing was more important than talking to me.
A willing subject in the kingdom of loneliness. Was this a closeness worth having, though?
/
I’ll ask in a more human key: would you forgive me if I told you I didn’t want to say it? Would I forgive myself? Trick question. It’s the truth. In that moment I would’ve given anything—tamed all my reckless yearnings, bet every song I owned on the lip of disaster, listened only to Ariana Grande for the rest of my life—not to say it.
I thought about it. If I couldn’t do friends, maybe I could do a steady love, a good-enough love. I’d wanted to feel something, like the pounding in my head at 3 A.M. walking home from the party with ichor & Lizzo sticky in my veins. I’d wanted excitement. & if I hadn’t found it in him, I’d certainly found it in this new reality, alone on campus, only living things the ghosts & the silence. I’d thought maybe if something broke, light would fizzle from the wreckage. I’d chased that light, pulled it back by its shoulder & looked it straight on, shockwave, instinct for survival. & now here I was: COVID-graced & eyes burning, wanting only to sing my way back.
I thought about it. He clearly still loved me. Hadn’t I had enough excitement?
I thought about it & then I said it. Because you do. It is astounding, the things you do knowing you have to. I don’t love you anymore. I need to move on & so do you. The beast inside me reared nauseous & airless. Doja Cat was stuck in my head, some song I didn’t recognise sober but in the centre of a dance floor could belt like nothing else. The silence over the phone could have split the sky.
He didn’t call me again. I cried for days.
/
How do you hear someone say you’re the only one for me, a quiet chant of tenderness large enough for two, & still let them go? How feral was I, how hungry to feel something—anything—that I knew exactly the shape & rhythm of loneliness, & still I preferred it to his touch?
/
Isolation is an odd place to fall out of love. But some things are muscle memory, & that song lives in my skull easy as a bullet: in sleep or in wake I can burn, in sickness or in health I can yearn, in life or in death I can chase gorgeous untouchable disasters. I have made a lifelong study of the word unrequited. I am good at wanting past mortality. If there’s anything I know for sure, it is how to short-circuit for love.
So instead of my deal is that I want you back, MARINA coached me on how to be a heartbreaker, Blackbear urged me to turn it up & throw a tantrum. The playlist from the final party was a last vestige of life before, a clean break if one could ever exist: all that joy crowded into one room & clamouring for attention. In all truth, most of my heartbreaks have been rather ordinary. It’s funny how the day you shatter completely is a Tuesday for everyone else. But here was a wreckage the whole world shared—a comfort, in a way, although I couldn’t help but nurse the irrational terror that I’d singlehandedly invited this plague. It was its own kind of selfish. I wanted to believe there was still something I could control. My animal soul was cringing, coiled & foetal.
/
A month later I got on a plane with only four other passengers. Megan Thee Stallion blared from my earbuds, uncomfortably loud.
I think part of me was born devoted to wreckage. I texted my family’s group chat, my best friends, a girl I refused to believe I was falling in love with. on the plane. text u when i land. Then I found myself reading through the text I hadn’t sent him, the one telling him I was going to bed, that he shouldn’t be worried about me right now. Still in the draft box, where I’d left it. Nicki Minaj was taking apart some nameless boy in my earbuds. Six rows ahead, a flight attendant asked a passenger to fasten his seat belt. I couldn’t tell you now if I was thinking I’mstarving or I’msorry or pleasejustgivemesomething. How many times can you choose the thing that hurts before you can’t call it an accident anymore.
I deleted the text & wrote a new one. i’m so sorry. here’s a playlist. He knew I hated pop music. I didn’t care. Four people on the plane & I sent the text. Deleted his number. Pulled up my mask. Mouthed along with Doja Cat, lightning in my throat as the plane rose, a final breaking.
/
I say the word breaking & I hope you know I am telling you about the body. I am writing down this word & I am asking you to touch it. Maybe that’s all I can ask for: to be bitten into, corporeal, known. I’m telling you about the body. Not the shadow, the body. The blood on the floor isn’t a compromise. I want to forgive you. I want to forgive him, or at least myself. What comes to mind when I say animal? Are you sick or are you awake? The body knows more than I ever gave it credit for. This isn’t you anymore says the body. Send the goddamn text says the body. Something is trying to kill you says the body. Do you want it to succeed? It’s not that I get off on this, it’s that I can’t get myself off this. The body says it doesn’t matter anymore where I came from. All that matters is the moment I didn’t look back. God I’m lonely says the body. I don’t know if I can fix this one says the body. This isn’t you says the body. Is the body right? Trick question. How would that change anything?
/
(Silver-Tipped Swallow is a column by Topaz Winters about the ways in which music intertwines with our experiences in loving, losing, and lingering on what remains. This column, along with two more by the HM team and dozens more pieces of art, music, and writing by contributors, is published in Half Mystic Journal’s Issue VIII: Sforzando. It is available for preorder now.)