How could I possibly say it better? This song is the red brick building you lived in off Main Street in downtown Eau Claire and the first time I walked into your room how you hadn’t even cleaned it because we’d known one another since we were 15 and 17 and so what did it matter. And the flour on your apron and your shoes. You’d just come from your job at Sammy’s Pizza. And the movie theater across the street and every movie theater in memory for us, somehow in my memory it is either July or January all the time, we are struggling through snowdrifts or running into waist-high water in Lake Nokomis, singing Beach Boys songs and Badly Drawn Boy and Feist and The Arcade Fire, going somewhere fast. I conflate albums. I conflate years. I forget when it was that I saw you walking through a hallway that now does not exist and the light from the windows almost whited you out.
I listen to this song like it is summer and church and ice-skating and high school and first times traveling anywhere all in one. This one, too. Thank you for that.
“How deeply and passionately most of us live within ourselves. Our attachments are ferocious. Our loves overwhelm us, define us, obliterate the boundaries between ourselves and others.”
-Paul Auster, True Tales of American Life, xvii
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