A poem from the other side
On Love: The end of a marriage, Indian curry, and The First Two Pages of Frankenstein
I’m making Indian curry and I’m home alone. It’s rare that I have the whole house to myself and what I really want to do is sit outside in the sun and read. But dinner has to be made and I’d much rather make it alone than with my almost two-year-old son hanging around my legs, requesting me to play George Strait songs. I’d choose just about any country song over “Baby Shark” or “Old Macdonald,” and Strait has some good songs—“Amarillo By Morning” is a nostalgic favorite of mine as my grandpa used to sing it to me when I was little—but sometimes, most times, I want to listen to my music. I want to listen to what my son calls mama songs.
The National is mama songs. They released a new album in April (I’ve been waiting for this for four years!), but I’ve been holding off on listening to it because I wanted to hear it uninterrupted.
“Alexa, play The First Two Pages of Frankenstein by The National.”
When the opening piano to the first track starts, my heart swells to an ache in my chest.
“Alexa, turn the volume all the way up.”
I’m peeling garlic, crushing it under my knife and the room is filling with the sweaty, stinging scent. I’m listening to the lyrics and my entire relationship is flashing through my mind.
What was the worried thing you said to me?
I thought we could make it through anything
I’m slicing ginger and measuring out garam masala and crying before the first track is over. The album takes me through a relationship that is ending—through broken hearts, self-loathing, exhausted hope, desperate last gestures, and the grasping of memories. I feel all of it as if it is my own loss.
My husband and I fell in love to The National’s High Violet album almost twelve years ago. Perry stayed with me in my rotting apartment in Los Angeles and I’d listen to him sing songs from High Violet in the shower. His voice, deep and low, resonated off the bathroom walls and into my bones. The love I felt for him terrified me. It still does.
I was afraid one day he would leave because that was the pattern I had come to know in my life, not particularly with men because I’d never let my guard down long enough to let myself get close to anyone I dated, but with the people I grew up loving. My mother, my father, my brother—they had all left me at one point or another. I think a big part of me is waiting for Perry to do the same even though he’s never shown any signs of leaving. He can hardly go to the grocery store without calling me twelve times. But somehow, I still turn into that left little girl and I can’t help but get stuck in the cycle of waiting for something bad to happen (Don’t worry, I’m in therapy).
Our love came easy those first nine or ten years. Our relationship worked without us trying. We grew together and ebbed and flowed in the same directions, at the same time. Then the pandemic happened and we made a baby and we’ve been trying to find our way back to each other ever since.
There are moments where I feel like we’re the strongest and happiest we’ve ever been, but then there are others where I question how we ever got together in the first place. When we have arguments and misunderstandings, I wonder if we ever really knew each other. Perry always assures me that we did. We do. It’s just that the life we started building together isn’t the life we have now. The life we have now is beautiful in its own way. We have a business together. We have a home. We have a son. But the Us gets lost in the business, in the day-to-day tasks of living, in the parenting. I miss being lovers. I miss sex in the golden afternoons. I miss conversations about art and nothing else. I miss our entire life being one long date night.
We haven’t talked about divorce in a serious way but in the heat of communication breakdowns, I’ve thought what if. What if we separated? What would that look like? And I can never picture it because I don’t know how to imagine life without Perry. He’s a part of me. In the birthday card he gave me on Monday he wrote, “At this point, I swear I am made up of mostly you. You are my everything.” I resonated with that sentiment so much because I feel the same, but sometimes I can feel the disconnect like my own beating heart.
At home, I’m rinsing lentils at the sink and listening to “Eucalyptus,” the second track from the new The National record. The song is about the separation of a marriage, the separation of things. How do we divide a life into parts—a life that was once lived as one? The song and the album as a whole take me to the other side—to the end of a relationship. It’s showing me what would happen without me having to go through it myself. I’m walking through a portal to the other side of what if and all at once I can see the beginning and end of everything.
I can see the Los Angeles summer when we fell in love, the long days of doing nothing, the sweaty hikes that turned to orgasms under the trees, the road trips with his hand on my thigh, the hours/days/years of grief where I cried into his neck, the walks by the sea where we said everything in the way we looked at each other, the orange wine we shared during that month in Italy, the home we built together in the mountains that are always blue, our son, our son, our son.
I can see the sleepless nights, the shaking voice in the dark are we really over, the forced joy and cartoon voices when our son runs into the kitchen during an argument, the empty rooms, the moving truck filled with nothing but instruments, the lingering hug where it hurts just as much to let go as it does to hold on, the strained I love you that doesn’t mean what either of us needs it to mean, the weird goodbye that says we aren’t together but we don’t know how to be apart, our son, our son, our son.
I can see it all, and at this moment, my husband pulls up to our house with our son and a car full of groceries. I’m watching him get the baby out of the car seat and I go outside to greet him. He walks through the gate and sees me waiting for him on the path. Our son is waving. Perry sets him down and Pressley toddles his way to me. He hugs my legs and I kiss his head. He walks past me to his chalk drawings on the porch. My husband reaches me on the path and I hug him. It’s hot and we’re both starting to sweat but I hold him anyway. I feel him sigh in a comforting way. When I let him go he says he’s going to unload the groceries.
I bring my son inside and finish cleaning up from the curry. My husband is putting away the blackberries and I tell him about The First Two Pages of Frankenstein. I tell him about how I saw the end of us. The aftermath. Everything. He asks if that’s why I hugged him when he got home. I said that it was and also that I love him. I wondered, have I really been so unreachable that he needs a reason as to why I hugged him? Isn’t love a good enough reason to hug someone? When does a hug stop meaning I love you and start meaning something else?
Later, I can't shake the feeling of loss so I do what I always do when I’m feeling off. I write. I write a poem inspired by The National’s “Eucalyptus.” It’s a beautiful and exhausting journey through all the things that are important to me, and important to us. The sentimental things and the mundane. The things that you think don’t matter, but in the end, you find out that they do. The things that make up a marriage, a love, a life.
The song, the album, the poem—it reminds me of everything I love about my husband and the life we’ve created. I don’t want to say that The First Two Pages of Frankenstein saved my marriage, but maybe it did. Who’s to say where we would’ve ended up without this portal to the other side? The album is mending the frayed connection. It’s bringing us back to each other. And this is the power of music. It can heal your life. It can heal your marriage.
The National’s frontman Matt Berninger says he likes writing songs about things falling apart and maybe that’s why his songs reach me so deeply. Because, I, too, like writing about things falling apart. I like writing into the pain and the loss and the fear. In some sort of weird way, it makes me feel better. In an interview with Variety, he said, “I write about things that I’m afraid might happen. Whether it’s the breakup of the band, or my marriage, I think those things are always better off if you look over the edge and say, Oh yeah, this is the edge, and I don’t want to get any further.”
This is what I did with the writing of this poem. I looked over the edge, and god damn, I don’t want to go any further.
Before you read it, I encourage you to listen to “Eucalyptus” by The National as it’s the reason the poem exists. There’s a certain broken but hopeful rhythm to the song that I hope you bring into the poem as you read it. I’m sharing the video but it’s not an integral part of the listening experience. Close your eyes if you want. Whatever it takes for you to truly hear it.
You Should Keep It, Maybe I Should Keep It
(after The National)
What about the pressed flowers? What about the painting of the peaches? What about the love letters? Maybe we should burn these What about the dreams we had? What about the Steinbeck typewriter? What about the writing desk? What if we moved back to California? What about the hanging roses? What about the poems on the wall? What about the polaroids? Maybe we should bury these What about the kiss goodnight? What about the steel guitar? What about the birthday cards? What if I changed my hair again? What about the hemlocks? What about the Dylan records? What about the leather notebooks? Maybe we should lose these What about the little bird? What about the thrift-store coats? What about the Eternal Sunshine? What if we started over? What about the tarnished rings? What about the sunset lamp? What about the stacks of books? Maybe we should leave these What about the Hollywood summer? What about the silk dresses? What about the sad songs? What if I reached for you? What about the Blue Ridge Mountains? What about the snow globe? What about the chalk drawings? Maybe we should erase these What about the ticket stubs? What about the maps of Spain? What about the fireflies? What if we stopped rushing? What about the undeveloped film? What about the hanging pathos? What about the tiny handprints? Maybe we should keep these What about the plans we made? What about the bed frame? What about the words underlined? What if we learned to be happy?
Thank you for reading and supporting my work here. If you have the time and space, listen to the whole album by The National all the way through. Think about the one you love. Think about the life you’ve lived and the life you want. Think about you. I hope you enjoy it as much as I have.
The rawness of this is beautiful and heartrending. After listening to Eucalyptus, I think you captured the melancholy longing found within that song perfectly. Your work is brutally honest in a quiet, reflective way, like a mirror that doesn't hide any imperfections.
I've had several songs heal me throughout the years depending on what's happening in my life. The artist that holds that space for me the most is Florence + the Machine, particularly her album Lungs. Another song that always hits me and makes me feel seen is this one by Lord Huron: https://open.spotify.com/track/1bqrRn1pJWowNLA5N9L6uW?si=d0c764bf0c484d88
This one got me, the deep cut and the observance of it. “I, too, like writing about things falling apart. I like writing into the pain and the loss and the fear. In some sort of weird way, it makes me feel better.” I’ve always felt this deeply. I enjoy your writing for the way it shows the life that can hide in the dark corners of our human experience and for the lyrical sentences woven through, I enjoy it also for the kinship I seem always to find in it.