A Little Bit Closer

When relationships end, people may fight over pets, fight over furniture, collections, kids. One thing that has always struck me, for certain, but not all relationship apocalypses is songs. Music where affection and attachment were forged and welded together with tunes and lyrics from particular artists. It provides the rhythm to togetherness, to grooves of the “us.”

When a relationship ends, the rhythm of togetherness sometimes sours, turns grimly bitter. What once caused joy, now feels like it creates bone cancer. Songs or artists that I shared with someone and used to make me smile, now make me retch, make the skies insidiously darken in the space between beats. The muscles remember, even what the mind or heart wishes it could forget.

For one particularly tough relationship, the music of Tegan and Sara was part of the soundtrack of us. For years I enjoyed it alongside her. For my girlfriend at the time, she was a twin and adored the duo, and introduced me to their music.

But as our happy few years came crashing to a very bombastic end, I found as I crawled from the wreckage that I now detested Tegan and Sara. I knew I didn’t really, but I couldn’t help it. Some cosmic decision had been made and all I could do we chafe against this unjust judgement. Even when my kids and I heard their song “Everything is Awesome” from “The Lego Movie,” they were mildly surprised to see me hurl popcorn at the screen and yell obscenities in our language.

I wished Phillip K. Dick had written a book, The Habaeus Corpus Song Bureau. Perhaps a companion to The Adjustment Bureau. The literary bureacraticization of some amorphous entity to help give a face and a structure to some of the random things that we feel and can’t control in our relationships or their wake. I wished there was a place I could petition. It would be an office where the music would be from a Beatles cover band that only does covers of passages from Kafka.

There would be a court where I could make my case that somehow the songs should be released from whatever was holding them in limbo, whatever was keeping them with her, whether it was in me, in her, out in the ether, whatever was preventing me from enjoying the music in her absence, I wanted it to become vapor. A place to go to petition that a song or set of songs an entire artist’s catalog, being held captive by the dead, rotting husk of my past relationship can be released.

I imagine this place might have a judge who has earbuds in and clearly isn’t paying attention to anything you are saying and would determine your case by taking a quiz on Buzzfeed.

For years, the dread around the music, the inability to listen easily or openly to it persisted. But part of me always hoped that somehow this negativity would dissipate. I felt like I was like one of the Jesus Christ’s disciplines waiting outside the Sanhedrin. I was eager for the music to be released from its unjust imprisonment, but in the interim, my faith was always being tested and tempted with denial. Until it was freed, I couldn’t acknowledge my attachment. Each time a Tegan and Sara song would come on in the courtyard, and someone would ask, “Hey don’t you like this song?” I would shriek, “No! not me!” I hate this song! You have confused me with a fool that used to listen to it with a woman who should come with a warning label, 'Should not be allowed to handle human hearts again!'"

A few months ago while I was at the gym. The Youtube algorithm was attempting to randomly meet my musical workout needs, and a Tegan and Sara song came on. I scarcely noticed it at first, “Closer” from their album Heartthrob. But eventually I was happily mouthing along to the lyrics as I ran on the treadmill. It was a moment of such elation when I realized that I was enjoying a Tegan and Sara song for the first time in six years! I was wrapped up so much in the emotion, I did forget I was on a moving treadmill and almost wiped out on the non-moving floor.

I spent that night listening to Tegan and Sara again, enjoying it anew. It is strange how things work. I even feel like some of the weight of the pain of that relationship had left that day as well.