So you're gone and I'm haunted. And I bet you are just fine.
Yeah, it’s like that sometimes…
This is true, and truly devastating.
Also, I bolded my favorite line.
As I was reading Meg’s painfully accurate summation of pretty much our first two years in New York, a particular story from that period in time stands out to me:
The story goes: a very important man in Meg’s life was visiting after spending a year in New Zealand. Meg was in love with this guy, like scribbling-in-her-diary, writing-elaborate-postcards-and-paying-for-air-mail-stamps, driving-through-the middle-of-the-night-across-5-states-to-visit-him-in-a-VERY-ILLEGAL-rental-van, in love. I HATED this guy, as I had since senior year of college, solely based on the very little information I hate about him blowing off Meg. That’s all I needed to know; that’s all I still ever need to know. I have a lot of loyalty-rage. Having grown up since then, I miss being able to hate someone so utterly without having to consider “the circumstances” or “the transient nature of human emotion.”
Long story short, we meet up with this guy for a drink, and after about an hour he’s like, okay, good to see you, bye and runs off into a cab with SOME OTHER GIRL. And the whole time it’s like, you see your friend about to plunge their hand into a bonfire, and you want to knock their hand away and say “Don’t do that! Don’t you know that’s going to hurt?!” But they do and they don’t, so Meg’s there with her mangled hand and I’m like, O NOOOOO. So of course we go to McDonald’s
The McDonald’s we went to was at Delancey and Essex at 2am; if you are familiar with this particular McDonald’s, you know that pretty much everyone who is there after about 10:00pm is at the bottom of some pit of despair or another. Because it’s near the bridge? I don’t know. Meg sat there stunned like a bomb had gone off in front of her face, which it had, EMOTIONALLY. As she relives the past 3 years in nightmarish detail, I eat nuggets and become aware of the radio station. It’s Delilah After Dark, and the song she is playing is “Goodbye My Almost Lover” by A Fine Frenzy, which in case you have never heard, is THE SADDEST SONG EVER WRITTEN. For example:
“Goodbye, my almost lover
Goodbye, my hopeless dream
I’m trying not to think about you
Can’t you just let me be?”Meg has always been the more romantic of us; I’ve always been infinitely more cynical, or as I like to think of it, “observant”. I’ll always remember telling her at one point about this same guy,”He lied to you”, and her look of confusion, and her being like, “No, haven’t you been listening. We were in BED together when he said it.” I remember the horror I felt, like I was pulling back the veil on some unspeakable truth. Some of them will lie to you naked! In bed! I am so sorry! Or the even greater horror, from my perspective, is that some of them won’t, but you almost certainly will never be able to tell the difference until you are bawling in a booth at the Delancey McDonald’s, with filthy bathrooms and a drunk teenager vomiting on the door and DELILAH playing. I said a little silent prayer: “Dear God, if you exist, please don’t let her hear the song.” I remember feeling physically terrified that she would fall quiet and hear:
“Did I make it that
Easy to walk right in and out
Of my life?”WHY WOULD DELILAH PLAY THAT? Doesn’t she know that half of her listening audience are sitting in the bathtub, about to drop the radio in anyway? I asked Meg about it later, and she said she hadn’t heard it, which means I owe God my first born. It was definitely worth it.
Some time later I remember meeting Meg in that same bird-decorated cafe one morning, so tired I could barely speak, because I was trying to date a divorced poet so insane with grief he thought he saw a ghost in his apartment. I remember Meg being like, “Yeah, I understand”, and sometimes that’s all you need to hear. I think at the age we were at, and in New York, you feel out of control and become out of control, because that’s when you learn that you do not actual have control, not over other people, or your own emotions, and that there is no justice when it comes to love, only fries, which is what makes the writers keep writing, and makes Delilah keep spinning for her Friday Nite girls.
Reblogged from mustanghalle
