We are sitting in that diner and I am offering you a bite of my sandwich. We are laying stomachs down on her couch and you are watching my lips and inching closer. I am turning my head in the morning and reaching for your sleeping body from across the room. By the drain and the peeling fence and the streetlight, we are hugging and kissing goodbye so many times, and not enough. I am leaning across the console. We are shaking hands.
I am 17 and I am tired. I took a train into Boston yesterday morning and got lunch with an old friend. We sat in a garden and I took my sunglasses off for long enough to make sure my skin wasn't burning but that was all. It was too bright. My ears are too big. I have saved every train ticket from the past 12 months. I spent much of the day pulling up the straps of my tank top and trying to hold them in place. They continued to fall.
Friday night, my friend Sophie and I went into the city to see Laura Marling. We sat on the train platform, waiting for the commuter rail, and talked about the far future. I told her that I never want to have the choice to live without her, even cities apart, or states, or countries. This summer isn't the last summer before we leave for college, but it is the last summer before we graduate. I have a feeling I've written that sentence before, and probably here, too. We watched orange girls in neon outfits take pictures of themselves in the sunlight. I didn't have to look at her to know she was smiling.
The show was brilliant. It was the third time I've seen her perform. Far and away, she is one of my favorite artists currently making music. No one else is doing what she is doing, not that I know of. She commanded the stage and attention of every listener, as she has the other times I've seen her. I could only shift my legs between songs. When her voice was filling that room, my body was still. I knew every word but could not open my mouth. She played two new songs, videos of which are here and here. I was mesmerized. I could not look away.
Each time I've seen her, she has played this song. The first show of hers that I went to was the fall of my freshman year. I had been planning on taking my mother with me, but a procedure she was having done was booked for that morning, so I took my sister. She was a few months pregnant by that time, her stomach large enough that she had to push her chair back from the table we were sitting at. A woman sat across from me and told me about her daughter and her husband and her life and Laura came and left and those first few months of high school were challenging for many reasons, many of which I'd expected, and a few I hadn't, and that night lifted those woes and carried them somewhere else, even temporarily, even just to the door. I was able to look at my sister and her swelling stomach, and this new woman with her aged hands, and smile. That is what Laura Marling does for me.
I have grown up and that song has followed me. It still makes me cry. I hear it when I need to, either from a crowd or the safety of my bedroom. It has remained the same, though I haven't, though she hasn't, though she has grown, too, and her hands are more confident, and the echo of her voice, throughout that hall and the pit of my stomach.
I still haven't been able to thank her. Chances are I never will. Chances are I've accepted it. I don't have much else to write. I start working tomorrow. I'm working on a review of The Hartford Book by Samuel Amadon and reading Tasteful Nudes by Dave Hill. I'm working on living.
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