kiwi public radio
on endings (+ LET CHRISTIE SCREAM!)
Give it to me like I need an epiphany / In the depths of my soul there’s a shallow sufficiency, born of tyranny / Hiding from you since the last time you came around / Did I not say enough? Did I say that I wish you well?
In life, I am excellent at beginnings and terrible at endings. In writing, the inverse is usually true. This is mainly because for almost everything I’ve written, the ending is the first part I think of. I start already knowing where I’m headed – I just have to figure out how to get there.
For me, there’s no better rush than careening toward the end of a piece. My friend Sofiya once told me, When your writing takes off, it soars like a rocket. That’s also what it feels like to actually put the words down. With every word the pressure builds on the page and in my throat like the ache before the first sob. And then eventually I break into a flow state that’s unlike any other feeling. There’s no gap between how fast my brain can think of the words and how fast I can type them. I can feel the writing swell beneath my fingertips and almost always I start to cry, because every time I manage to access this I always think it’s the last time. The joy of giving myself up to the work, of feeling like I’m doing what I was born to do, is inextricable from this preemptive unfounded grief. The writing always comes back, but I can’t let go of the idea that one day it might leave me forever, and I’ll be left with only a fraction of a soul. (Anxious attachment girlies make some noise!!!)
This scarcity mindset doesn’t just poison my writing life: every time I have any sort of romantic or sexual entanglement, it feels like it’ll be the last time, so every time, it hurts just as badly. Yesterday, I said a final, permanent goodbye to a woman I knew I could’ve fallen in love with if circumstances had been different. But they aren’t, because life isn’t a book or the manic pixie dream girl romantic tragicomedies I watched religiously in high school instead of having sex. I think I’ve finally accepted that just because someone swept you off your feet when you weren’t looking doesn’t mean you’re destined to be together. There’s no such thing as a sign. There’s no such thing as fate. People come into your life and then they leave and there is no meaning and there is no lesson. You take what you can get until the universe decides you’ve had enough and rips her away, or until she decides she’s had enough and sets herself free. And it’ll never be your call, because you’ll never have enough. You are a black hole for desire and you can’t turn it off, no matter how long you pray to a god you don’t believe in while lying alone in bed surrounded by shreds of the memory of almost-love.
Almost will always be more painful to me than a concrete failure. I can admit that I am pretty fucking lazy in most aspects of my life, but when it comes to writing and love I always want to at least try. If it crashes and burns, oh fucking well – at least we were brave enough to give it a shot, and we can always find comfort in that. At least we won’t have to wonder what if? for the rest of our natural lives. But she and I were in a unique situation that meant we quite literally could not give it a shot even though we both desperately wanted to: the night I met her, she immediately told me she was moving across the country in ten days, so you gotta move quick. As if that weren’t enough, she was also in a two-year open relationship. With the exception of a single half-year relationship when I was twenty, I’ve never been able to keep a relationship alive for longer than three months, so to me she may as well have been married. I was under no delusion that our one-night stand would blossom into anything more.
And then, suddenly, I was. We were.
It’s so strange, she whispered, awestruck, as she trailed a finger down my cheek at the start of our first night together, her heart beating against mine as she laid on my chest beneath the black sky in Fort Greene park. Kissing you feels so good, and I don’t even know you.
You won’t, I wanted to say, and it’s for the best that way.
I was smart this time. I did everything right. I kept my walls up, I was light and frothy, when she said she was going to miss me I laughed and said she would forget all about me when the California sun hit her skin again. When she said she was going to be confused after leaving New York, I didn’t ask what she meant. I didn’t want to complicate our lives any more than we already had. I was aiming for a clean break. And by all metrics most people would say I got one: we don’t hate each other, we didn’t block each other, I can’t conjure even one iota of anger towards her. But as I sat on my couch pressing my phone to my ear so I didn’t miss a single breath of hers, choking back sobs by biting down hard into the palm of my hand, it didn’t feel very clean.
Once I’d collected myself, I said, I guess we should stop deluding ourselves.
Yeah, she replied, but it was fun to live in the delusion for a while.
Thinking of you as I fumble to change the song / Cause it sounds too much like the nights I’m reminded of / Like the party we had where your friends all sang along / Did I not say enough? Did I say that I need your love? / Cause I need your love.
When I was nineteen I fell in love, real soul-expanding world-burning mind-shattering full-body-high psychotically obsessive turn-you-into-a-monster love. Shortly after that relationship imploded, my favorite band released a new single. The band is Yumi Zouma. The single was Cool For A Second. They are a New Zealand-based alt-pop band, and their music has saved my life countless times. (This is not *THE* Yumi Zouma essay, not yet. But it’s *A* Yumi Zouma essay just the same.) Their music scratches every little itch on my brain. I don’t know how else to describe it. I don’t know if I’ve said this before on the blog, but all of my all-time favorite songs have a specific quality I like to call “expansive,” or “twirly” – music that makes me feel huge, music that makes me feel like I’m flying, music that sets my body spinning no matter where I am or what I’m doing. This is how Yumi Zouma’s entire discography makes me feel. Many have come close, but none have achieved the euphoria and catharsis that "Mona Lisa," "Give It Hell," "December," "Cool For A Second," or "Short Truth" have. And none of those five even come close to what the band’s newest single, “KPR,” has done to my body and brain today.
A few hours after our final phone call yesterday, I was coming back inside from my coping smoke break (weed, not cigs – I value my life at least a little) when I realized it was 12:21am, which meant that “KPR” was finally out on the East Coast. I stumbled to my bed and settled my headphones over my ears. I was not remotely prepared for what washed over me.
Yumi Zouma knows how to write an ending, both to individual songs and albums / EPs. It’s especially apparent on their 2022 record, Present Tense, where every song builds to a lush crescendo and complete release. “KPR” could’ve easily been a track from Present Tense, but the group took it to another level. The lyrical content is phenomenally poetic as always. (Rhyming epiphany with both sufficiency AND tyranny? WHERE is their Pulitzer?) The synths are ever-present. The guitar riffs are intense and unforgettable. And lead vocalist Christie Simpson lets out some fantastically feral SCREAMS in the background, reminiscent of the late-aughts Yeah Yeah Yeahs. It’s undeniable: Yumi Zouma is slowly but surely going rock, and it’s marvelous to witness. If this single is any indication of what we’re going to get on EP IV, let me be the first to say I can’t fucking WAIT.
YZ has a truly uncanny ability to release new music when I am at my absolute worst. “Cool For A Second” and “Mona Lisa” both came out right around some major breakups, and now “KPR” is out just in time to save me from a depressive spiral over what could have been and will likely never be. It’s like they can feel my heart breaking from across the world like a disturbance in The Force and decide, Hey, Mia really needs this. And you know what? I do. I need it so bad. At the time of this line’s writing, I have now listened to this song for ten straight hours. I am not kidding. I have had it on repeat for TEN. HOURS. That’s how good it is.
I am a lyrics-first girl, which I’m learning every day that I’m alive is rare. To me, the words are as vital as the music they ride on. It’s the writer in me. That’s where the meaning lives! And I love that lyrics aren’t an afterthought to Yumi Zouma. Most people listen to them for their vibey instrumentals, which are a perfect soundtrack for the local stoner looking to roll up and unwind. But if you take the time to look up the words to their songs or just listen, really listen, you’ll gain a whole new appreciation for their music.
I could do a close reading of the “KPR” lyrics if I wanted, but it would take too long, and I want to keep a tight focus for this post anyway. The moment in my first “KPR” listen when I truly lost it was the first time we hear the final line of the refrain: Walking down your street, and I’m sick of the ending.
The last time I saw her in person, I turned around at the corner of her block for one last look. Well, I called, grinning wide, projecting a levity I didn’t feel, the ghost of her lips still pressing against mine, goodbye forever! I wanted to run back and brush her curls off her brow again. Instead I waved, turned again, and walked out of her life, away from all our possibility, all our potential energy.
Will I ever be able to walk down Metropolitan Avenue again without being washed away by a wave of grief?
Come and pick me up from the parking lot, cause I took too much of your pure dedication / A fading star to a burnt-out car / Did you drive too fast cause you needed attention?
We agreed, during the call, that it would be best to suspend communication indefinitely. I say “suspend indefinitely” rather than “cut off forever” because I’m still a little bit in denial, but also because who knows what the future will bring? But regardless, the effect and impact are ultimately the same: I miss her. It feels like every hour I experience something I want to text her about, then remember that I can’t, and my heart breaks all over again. (I don’t understand how someone I’ve only known for two weeks can have this kind of effect on me, but then again I’m a lesbian, so I don’t know why I’m surprised.) I can’t tell which one of us is the fading star and which is the burnt-out car, but I know I’m so GODDAMN weak, and I know I need to stop pretending there was ever a universe where something real would’ve come from this.
I don’t want you to blow up your life for me, I said, and she cut me off — Well, it’s not like that. I wouldn’t really be blowing up my life, I wouldn’t do that for anyone. Here I go again, artificially inflating my presence and meaning in someone’s life. Humiliating myself when I should’ve known better, how dare I compare two weeks to two years, but I couldn’t stop myself. I never can.
There’s a scene in my favorite book, Women by Chloe Caldwell, where the narrator meets her ex for a final closure talk, and the ex says, If anything, I thought you were stronger than you were. In love I always think I’m stronger than I am. I thought I could handle this. I thought… I don’t know what I thought. That I could be normal. That I could let her lips hover millimeters above mine until my thighs began to twitch, that I could show up at her apartment in a miniskirt and let her kiss me to guess what I’d been drinking that night, that I could let her see my eyes water and still make it out alive. I’m sick of setting myself up for failure, of dooming myself with temporary passion, of my strongest connections forming with girls who already have one foot out of my life. I’m just so sick of endings.
I text a friend: I DON’T WANT TO FEEL THIS MUCH ANYMORE TELL ME HOW TO TURN IT OFF I WANT TO STOP I NEED TO STOP PLEASE PLEASE TELL ME HOW TO STOP
I text a friend: i’m embarrassed, and i wish i’d protected myself better, because i can’t seem to stop doing this
I text a friend: people keep telling me they wish they could feel things as deeply as i do but i promise you nobody wants to feel this way.
A friend texts me: Don’t beat yourself up, it’s good to have an open heart
I respond: then why does it feel so bad all the time
She responds: Bc you’re a writer
and I can’t really argue with that.
I don’t know why you feel lost inside / But I’ve lost my mind and I’m sick of pretending / You’d die for me cause I’m so damn weak / Walking down your street, and I’m sick of the ending.
Meme corner
