Exit Row

I got drunk on the plane because I listened to Ode To The Mets by the Strokes, and it made me think incessantly of you. I was sitting on the window seat of the exit row, and as I put the window shade up, the warm, winter sun hit my face, and it reminded me of waking up on your mattress in your studio apartment in New York and feeling the heat of your sleepy face on mine. It was delightful. You liked to put music on in the mornings, and I had teased you because of your taste, saying it was for middle-aged white men who had a man cave and a looming divorce. That was mean. You laughed, though. I went to the bathroom and got into the shower. Looking back now, I wish we had showered together more. I hated asking you to come with me because I wanted you to want to come with me without me asking, but I should have insisted if that’s what I wanted. Anyway, I remember the exact moment you played Ode To The Mets by the Strokes, and although I was distracted by my shower, I subconsciously absorbed its genius because later that afternoon I asked you to go through your Spotify history so I could find that song. And we played it again and again, and I think that was one of the moments that I fell in love with you. I loved it when you showed me new things. And so, as a token of my appreciation, I made you a playlist of all the songs that we’d listened to together or had found or had reminded me of us. We were drunk in bed when I showed it to you, and you seemed totally taken aback and subtly bewildered, which translated to gratitude, as if no one had done anything like that for you before. It made me feel like what we had was all the more powerful and uniquely ours, and motivated me to keep showing up for you in that way. Still to this day, I don’t know if you’ve ever listened to “From Paris to New York” (the playlist), or if you even remember that it sits saved in your Spotify library.

Another song I can’t listen to without wanting to cry is The Air That I Breathe by The Hollies. I found it the same way I found so many things with you: by waking up beside you. We were in New Jersey, at your friend’s family home for Thanksgiving. He, the kind of person who fills a house with music, played the most beautiful classics I’d ever heard. It was 11 am. Your arms were wrapped around me as sunlight came in through the trees. Downstairs, The Air That I Breathe played through a loudspeaker, and Will strummed along on his guitar, the sound drifting into our bedroom. Waking up like that, held inside that melody, was another quiet moment I fell in love with you. Later, I had to ask Will the name of the song. I needed to hear it a thousand times, to add it to the playlist.

What a beautiful, total waste of love and, more tragically, great music that I can no longer listen to.