It can’t go on like this

I went to Portland last night to see Jens Lekman’s latest tour. Jens’ music has been a formative part of my emotional landscape for the past twenty years. The vulnerable honesty of his songs have draped the walls of my inner world like tapestries, depicting significant moments in history and coloring the stories with bittersweet truth and hope all at once.

After not having listened to his new work in years, I was unintentionally avoiding it, some part of me secretly resigned that it wouldn’t strike me the same way that it used to (as often happens with artists over time, their shifts in direction parting from mine and eventually feeling like a hollow echo best left alone). Without realizing it, the fear of that disappointment had kept me at arms’ length from his latest album and the book that was published alongside it, even though it was already sitting on my bookshelf, unread. Some part of me was loathe to disturb the memories that still ring true every time the night falls over Kortedala.

That part of me was wrong, though. What I was really distancing from was my own intensity that I’ve been running away from for the past ten years, a beauty that takes hold of me and reminds me of every joy and ache I’ve carried since I first longed for company in some little corner of my heart — and at times, found it, beautiful and unbearable in equal measures.

Songs for Other People’s Weddings didn’t fail to deliver. I failed to anticipate just how well it would, and how open and tender I would feel walking out the doors back into a world I had been shrinking from only three hours before. The same sidewalk I’d traversed nervously through the dark in the early hours of the evening now seemed expansive and full of possibility into the thickness of night after communing with Jens and David’s story, the grief and truth I’ve been hauling around like a heavy suitcase in my heart having been set down and opened up to the light of Jens’ gentle revelations.

This story is my story too, as it always seems to be. One I’ve lived before, love I’ve lost before, and one I’m living even now as I try every day to be a little braver and bring a little more of myself to my life and the people in it, terrified or joyful to do it. I may not be leaving to New York City, but I’m leaving for somewhere more meaningful in my heart, even while my feet stay in place for now.

There are some truths you can’t look back from once you truly hold them. I feel like I touched one at this show. There’s an incredible sadness in leaving a place you’ve called home, however cold it may be — but there’s a breath of freshness in it too, like a gust of cool Atlantic air brushing over exposed skin that’s too accustomed to being clad in sweaters and never seeing the sun.

The sun feels so warm today. Tomorrow, I might sting a little, pale as I’ve been. I might sting a little even now, salt water spray in my eyes. That’s alright. In these hands, it’s always alright to feel everything.