The first time through the pass, our driver explained its danger. If the nearby volcano erupted in a particular way, the lava would flow over the road we were driving on, into the town where we were about to have lunch. Twenty minutes would elapse between the first warning and the town’s demise. He’d thought a lot about what he’d do in that situation. If it happened, we’d have to go the long way around the country to get back to where we started.
If.
After lunch, we returned through the pass, and the driver—dressed like a French cartoon, speaking in a Bjorkian accent, with an Elven sense of mischief about him—delivered us a new warning about our next destination. The tides on the black sand beach were deceptive, he cautioned. Every seven to ten waves, a stronger one would rush ashore. Someone had been swept away and died the week before.
Don’t walk where you don’t see footprints, he told us. If you don’t see footprints, the water has washed them away.
“But,” he added, his warning delivered and affinity for folklore returning to his voice, “while you are on the beach, you may hear a rock speak to you. It happens sometimes. If you do, stop and pick it up, and listen. And if you feel so compelled, take it with you.”
If.
(She) knows something isn’t right with her. She doesn’t know what it is, aside from all of the issues she’s already aware of, and she’s terrified of what it might be.
Sometimes, when I’m in a place far from home, that place sings to me.
It’s happened for years now, these strange compulsions to listen to particular songs in locales of varying familiarity.
The New York City subway always brings me back to Jimmy Eat World’s “Lucky Denver Mint“; Boston has forced Stars’ “Your Ex-Lover is Dead,” LCD Soundsystem’s “Daft Punk is Playing at My House,” and Los Campesinos’ “We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed” upon me on different occasions; and certain parts of Reykjavik and London will likely feel like Charly Bliss’s “Camera” for as long as I live.
(To say nothing of my now years-long tradition of playing Japanese Breakfast’s “Heft“1 during every airplane takeoff.)
I can’t explain these urges. I can’t explain why a song takes root in my brain in certain spots, sometimes staying there for days. But when it happens, there is no other song in the world.
She said things like “I’m having a psychotic breakdown” and “I wish I was normal.” The latter, she says a lot when things go awry.
As the minibus approached the beach, I heard a tune rise from a whisper in the back of my head.
I tried to fight it as I stepped onto the dark shore, wandering from the ashy sand to the pebbled sections, never going far enough down that my feet fell where there was no evidence of others.
Around me, other tourists took all manner of photos, climbing up basalt pillars or ducking into a cave for the best visuals. I took in the scene, finding a few angles where I appeared alone, and taking a few shots myself. Unsurprisingly, I’d discovered over the course of the day that the best sights were always in the directions we weren’t told to look.
Having fulfilled my self-obligations, the whisper rose to a scream. I pulled my Airpods and iPhone out of their respective pockets, and tapped the song that was already playing in my mind.
Los Campesinos’ “The Sea Is a Good Place to Think of the Future” tells of a woman with a long and storied history of mental health issues—including an eating disorder, drug abuse, and self-harm—from the perspective of someone, a former lover perhaps, who worries upon seeing she’s up to her old tricks. His concerns extend beyond that, as far as briefly musing that she may have lost her moral compass before concluding the struggling woman “could never kiss a Tory boy without wanting to cut off (her) tongue again.”2
Even while calling out her struggles, he seems to struggle more. “She was always much too pretty for me to believe in a single word she said/believe a word she said,” he sighs. The next line, the band chastises him back:
“But what did you expect?”
She went shopping for clothes on Saturday, and decided afterwards that she’s going to try to eat only 800 calories a day for the next week at least.
I ambled down the beach, music filling my ears, listening beyond nonetheless. Thinking I heard what I was seeking, I reached down and grabbed a rock, turned it over in my hand, and resumed my stroll.
My fellow tourists took yet more photos in front of the sights, and I wondered to myself just how remarkable this place really was. Pretty? Sure. Absolutely.
But.
Earlier in the day, the bereted guide had taken to us to what he claimed was one of the most photographed waterfalls in the country. As we disembarked the minibus, I looked around at all the other tour vehicles in the parking lot, and thought to myself, Of course this is one of the most photographed sights. Half this island is bringing people here and telling them to take pictures. The next waterfall over would steal the title if you took them there instead.
The song ended, and when I removed the earbuds, I realized the rock I held was silent, yet another nothing special. I crept over the crest of the pebbles massed on the beach, down as far as the nearest footprints to the shore, cocked, and fired.
In handling the stone, I’d found a fairly flat and smooth side, one that made me think perhaps I could skip it back into the water. My arm action was untrue, my delivery revealing my amateur status. The rock tumbled out of my bandaged hand—I’d taken a tumble myself a week before—and plopped back into the ocean without a single bounce.
On, I wandered.
She’s blacking out from drinking too frequently for comfort. (…) Last month, she drove us home from a night out, only to admit later that she shouldn’t have.
The thing that struck me about the beach was the lack of color.
Oh, sure, the tourists were splashed in all the hues of the visible light spectrum, and the hillside that rose from the sea was bathed in green moss. Looking outward, though, looking away from the alleged sights, the low gray sky nearly merged with the threatening gray waves as they crashed onto the blackened shore. Were the waves less textured, the horizon may have disappeared.
I turned around, and wandered back the way I had come, my ears open once more as I stared at the next peninsula in the distance.
Finally, a whisper.
I bent over and picked up another rock, curved almost like a kidney. I turned it over in my hand again and again as I wandered towards and through a pocket of visitors, sharing a nod with my guide as I passed him by.
After several minutes, I was certain this second stone was the right one, and slipped it into my messenger bag. A few last photos later, I strode away from the water, and adjourned to the waiting minibus, which soon carried its half-capacity tour towards the next attraction.
She’s repeatedly, and fairly casually, said that if we ever broke up, she’d just kill herself. The way she says it, I’m really worried she means it.
On the road, the tour guide commenced yet another monologue, but I tuned it out. In the back of my mind, Los Campesinos sang on repeat, while my brain’s forefront occupied itself with other thoughts.
In Jewish tradition, visitors to graves leave stones instead of flowers—something permanent as a reminder, instead of yet another thing to decay. While I’ve forsaken virtually all of my erstwhile culture’s customs, this one remains, and though there’s only one grave in the world I currently mark, I’ve known since I was a child that there will inevitably be more.
The rest of the tour was uneventful, as was the following day. On the third, I left that island, “Heft” in my ears, and flew nearly a thousand miles to another land, a single letter off.
The stone was my lone souvenir.
In the days before I left home for this five-week trip, a sense of doom slowly settled over me, a premonition of something unimaginably bad happening while I was gone. I couldn’t pin it down, couldn’t discern any specifics. Would it happen to me? To someone I know, while I’m too far away to do anything? To my country, or the world?
Now, I find myself far closer to my return than my departure, and that foreboding feeling has diminished, but not disappeared. Something remains in the air.
I’ve spent the last three weeks coming and going from a city I may soon call home, a scouting trip thinly disguised as an extended vacation. My sole previous visit, this place resounded with the restrained longing of a Mitski tune, but this time has taken a turn for the darker.
There is only one song in this city.
Phoebe Bridgers’ “I Know The End” plays on repeat.
On occasion, something else will briefly break through. Waxahatchee’s “Never Been Wrong” fills my ears, and it’s the summer of 2017 again. (Or should those clauses be reversed?)
Briefly. But then: “I know, I know, I know.”
I know.
I know something is definitely dying, I just don’t know what. Not yet.
I have no idea where I’ll leave this stone.
-
“What if it’s the same dark coming?
The same dark
What if it’s the same dark coming?
The same dark
Oh, fuck it all then” -
“That line about never kissing a Tory boy: the Conservative party and anyone who votes for them is reprehensible and it is our duty to look out for and protect those of us less fortunate than ourselves and to challenge white nationalism head on wherever we find it.”
DIY Magazine
My;husband Jim Harris was very close to your dad. He came to Exxon and Jim took him under his wings.
They ran together after work. But what I really wanted to tell you is that when your dad met your mom he wanted Jim’s opinion. But Saul was in Baton Rouge. So Jim got a fake business trip to fly down to go out with both of them.
We were close with all of you even went into your pool. Enjoyed your moms parties. My husband was devastated we all were but he had to talk to someone. He felt like he was Sauls dad. I hope your mom and sister are doing well. I googled your name. This came up so Inwrote. Hope you don’t mind. Jim died at 71 of a brain tumor. 16 yrs ago.
I hope you are having a fulfilling life and say hello for me.