Memory Lane

Fall break is here.  Mostly that means I have truly epic amounts of work to do, but on Thursday, it meant a long-anticipated day of adventure.  It also meant I needed to get out of New Haven so badly that I was practically giddy by the time the tires hit 91-S and I was headed back to one of my "homes" - good old Northampton.  Given the many locations I could have chosen to see Brandi Carlile in concert this fall, Northampton topped the list of favorites and I bought tickets weeks ago, in anticipation of just such a trip.

Wandering around my old college campus is still surreal.  Less so, now that I'm a couple years out from graduating and I don't always feel like I'm wandering the earth without a purpose or a goal.  Plus, if you are unmoved by the beauty of western Massachusetts in the fall, then I really don't think we can be friends.

Rumor is, you cannot walk through the gates at Smith before you graduate or you won't, in fact, graduate.  Superstitious?  Sure, but I wasn't really willing to bet against superstition considering that my grasp on stability while I was at Smith was sometimes tenuous at best.  Point being, the weekend of commencement, you're meant to walk through the gates.  I forgot.  Two and a half years later, though, and instead of walking, I jumped.  Whee.

I also met up with an old friend - who is now a senior, good lord, she made me feel old.  Poised, and gorgeous, and so grown up - there I am, tearing up at the dinner table, remembering how young she was when she was a wittle first-year.  I felt like I was coming out in reverse, telling her I had a boyfriend now.  I think I even choked on the word a little bit.  It sounds weird coming out of my mouth.
"Does he make you happy?" she asked me.
"Yes.  Like, ridiculously happy." Sheepish grinning ensues.
"That happy?  Good lord.  Okay, fine.  Tell him I said hi."

And thus approval was gained.

* * *

Seeing Brandi Carlile live was the most fun I've had in a long time.  The concert was, in a word, incredible.  Her energy, her band, and good grief, her pipes - girl lights up the stage.  And her music rips my heart out and hands it back, with words that pierce my soul and chords that sound like the soundtrack to every ache in my heart.  I almost made it through the entire concert without crying, until the very last song.

When you're lost you will toss every lucky coin you'll ever trust

And you will hide from your god like he never turns his back on us

And you will fall all the way to the bottom and land on your own knife

And you'll learn who you are even if it doesn't take your life.

But mostly I'm just a sap and I cry really easily, especially to her songs.  On an unrelated note...Hurricane Sandy?  Seriously?  I feel like I should go out and buy some waders so that I can slosh to school if I have to.

Out of the Woods

Last Saturday, I took the train to New York and saw Bon Iver at Radio City Music Hall.  I've been back in the city a couple of times since I left almost a year ago (I still cannot believe it's been that long), but this time felt different.  I wandered around my old neighborhood.  I stopped by the bakery where I used to work.  I hoped I wouldn't awkwardly run into any of the families for whom I used to babysit or nanny (I didn't).  It felt both intimately familiar and incredibly foreign.  I couldn't help but wonder, as I wandered and walked and looked around, did I ever really belong here?  Was I ever happy here?

The concert was amazing.  Bon Iver is one of my favorite bands (artists?).  Anyway, the show was unreal.  And incredibly surreal.  I started listening to Bon Iver last November, late at night and early in the morning, on those infernal bus trips where I watched the rain streak down the windows and I took deep breaths to quell the pit of anxiety that knotted my stomach.  They became the soundtrack to the hardest winter I have ever lived through.  When Alix left me and I drove that night the eight hours through the frigid darkness home to my mother's arms, I listened to their newest album on repeat the entire way.  I couldn't risk hearing a single song that would remind me of the relationship from which I was so freshly torn and so I listened to the songs that had only been carrying me through the last month and a half.

Listening to Bon Iver does not make me happy.  Not in the way that listening to Ben Folds does, because it reminds me of doing dishes with my siblings when we were kids, or the way Paul Simon does, because I remember listening to him in the car with my dad, the windows open and the wind whipping my hair around my face.

But I listen to their songs, and I know that even though there will never come a time when I am absolutely, perfectly happy - just like I will never move somewhere where, magically, the depression doesn't know how to find me - I know that things will always change.  And the hard times will be, if not less hard, differently hard.  Nursing school isn't easy.  Neither was falling out of love with Alix.  But look, here I am.  Still listening and singing along.