II: Saudade | Searchlight Song: "Corporeal"
You know that ache? When someone good’s gone away and you don’t know when you’ll see them? When everywhere the air cries swan song, chalk outline, but no air can hope to hold you like a voice holds back the wind?
I don’t feel it. Never have.
Longtime family friends move away, cousins go back overseas, first-grade crushes leave the state for good—I’m still here. Moving. No wound yawning open inside me to mistake for a pulse. Or at least not one shuddering raw and red in any important place. It’s so easy to shove from door to door, this love with no limbs to push back with, no bones for circumstance to snap.
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I met my best friend in sixth grade. Our fathers knew each other through work. In the same well-meaning, misguided way that they always have, my parents introduced her to me as a Girl My Age, no doubt a friend after a few moments’ conversation. As if it’s ever that painless. She was tall, pale, long-limbed, with a sharp poise that didn’t sit quite right on the shoulders of an eleven-year-old girl. I disliked her immediately.
As luck would have it, she was shuffled into my band class right away. We were flutists, or so we called ourselves, long-suffering and constantly being drowned out by everyone else—if not the trumpets, the saxophones; if not the saxophones, the clarinets. Our equally long-suffering band teacher, trying desperately to balance out the sections, was always leaving us flutes to our own devices. I live well with aloneness, but not with boredom, and I realized I’d have to talk to the girl perched on the seat beside me if I ever wanted to feel at home between the smears of light and sound that band had flung me into.
Every word out of my mouth was a bright, stinging star, one searing the air into the next, only I was the only one who couldn’t tear her eyes away and every crash lasted for days on end. Cosmic accident. Pretty but I wouldn’t get too close.
I was a pianist, I told her. Had been since I was five. Same, except with violin. My brother played violin. Ha. Wish I had a sibling. I loved books maybe even more than I loved music. I mean, how can you not?
I wanted to call us friends. Friends? Sure. I like the sound of that.
/
Clearly, everything is wrong with everything. What use is feeling if it has no body? Don’t answer that. Who can kill an animal that can’t be touched? What I mean is I cut my finger on the lid of a can the other day. What I mean is I couldn’t let it hurt. I bound it up so tightly that there was nothing there but screech-soft anger—knotted, burning, imprecise. When I finally unwrapped the bindings hours later, the blood had knotted itself into them, careful. Known.
/
In retrospect, I suppose strangers might’ve thought it baffling that we were friends. She was the eternal odd-girl-in; I was a chameleon in every conceivable sense. She was tall and willowy; I was astoundingly short and more or less resigned to staying that way. She was white; I was not. This isn’t a story about culture, but it can’t not be: a picture held up to the sun is transparent.
The middle school program for high-achieving students that we both attended was overwhelmingly East and South Asian. The world was gasping into color all around me, and I threw myself into what I saw—because it felt so good, wouldn’t you know, to talk to someone who knew how it felt to be called the name of every other Asian girl in the grade before the teacher finally remembered which one was yours, to have even that name hacked into pieces you tried your best to recognize but couldn’t, to be told to go back to China regardless of whether that was where your blood had walked here from. And we were proud, so proud. When the rest of the school treated us like a disease, we blew back out at them, armed with grins and borderline offensive inside jokes that seemed all the more funny because they were in poor taste. (The only people who get to laugh about our pain, we said, are the ones who feel it with us.)
In the midst of all this, no one knew what to make of the ‘white Indian’ among us, this thin, strong, graceful girl who was as passionate about Bharatanatyam as she was about ballet, who brought daal to school for lunch but could rhapsodize about French food for hours if only you let her. But she was so easy to admire once you got to know her a little, with her impossibly long brown braid and rivers-deep composure, and when she explained—my dad’s Indian—we had to embrace her, all our reservations forgotten with a we-didn’t-mean-it and a smile.
Music has nothing and everything to do with this. A symphony can’t see color, maybe, but an orchestra can. And believe me, it does. No melody lives in a vacuum. No crescendo can swell inside a concert hall without hearts and souls to make it move. I was eleven, twelve, thirteen, still trying to see which gaps music could bridge and which it would only widen. I was smaller then, and music’s always done the strangest things to my depth perception.
I’d drifted away from the white friends I’d made in elementary school. Not through any one fault of mine or theirs but through a series of accidental short-circuits, each one leaving me dimly aware that some new forever had passed through my palms like smoke. I didn’t want to hope that I might get to keep this one, net her into every day like a swallowed song, a runaway flame come to rest.
/
What’s a person without the right feelings if not less than real?
Don’t answer that.
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The best nights were late and long and shimmering. Our best moments lived there, and our lowered-but-not-quite-low-enough voices, and our gorgeous, ragged secrets. Everything becomes funny after the night becomes morning with no one to see it. That or incredibly sad.
There were firsts upon firsts upon firsts. The first Fourth of July dinner with Indian food on the table beside our usual Korean. The first time I ever told someone about a crush. The first friend’s mother I could be on first-name terms with. The first friend’s grandmother who knew my name. The first time I ever played piano for someone because I wanted to and not because I was really any good.
I’ve never been good with the passage of time. I say that lightly, to so many people, but it’s anything but. It’s jarring to think of how much time went by and how hard I have to work at outlining it back into my memory every day. I’m trying to feel what I felt. I’m trying to remind myself that there was and will be something other than now. We built whole worlds together, remember? Co-wrote the beginning to an awful book together, realized how awful it was a few months later, despaired of our own arrogant and wondering selves. Played beautiful music that was, we joked, beautiful only if you haven’t seen how many goddamn thirty-second notes are on this score. We exchanged favorite books constantly. We found so many new favorite films. I’m imagining us like one of those films now, a montage of shadow and smiles, heavy with meaning and over in an instant. Only buildup for the real story. I really wanted the montage to be the whole story, you know? But we can’t have that. The shots slow down. The music drops out.
/
I want to know how this frame of mine came to be. I want to know why it isn’t enough. I want to open me up and leave. I want to fashion these spare parts into something that actually works. That bends away from the sun if you pull the right lever. I need an answer for the negative space. I need a boundary that will stop me when it has to. I need a face for the silence. One that I recognize.
I’m looking for a pattern in the bones. I’m getting farther away from every someplace. I’m giving up what is easy for what is standard. I’m shifting in and out of consciousness. I’m losing shape and gaining touch. I’m praying to all the gods I don’t believe in. I’m praying to the lullaby I do believe in. I need to know how to build a vessel for all this crackle and screech.
/
When she told me she was moving away, I think I laughed. You can tell so much about a person from the direction their body points when broken.
My other best friend had moved away just the year before, right after the end of middle school, and I was reeling even after so many months. I was so sharp-edge, so cliffside. All spite. I didn’t miss her so much as remember once, twice, ten times a day that she wasn’t right there next to me. I’ve always been good at convincing myself of things—this is normal, this is what I’ve always wanted this is all I have any right to ask for—but this one took some doing.
Anyhow, I laughed. Part of me is still laughing.
I tagged along when her family went house hunting, as a kind of last hurrah, and we flew down to spend a few days roaming this dry new world she was to leave me for. Out of spite and some other bitterness we didn’t want to name, we complained about the town’s lack of good bread and aggressively green trees we hadn’t known we loved until that moment. We met lovely people by coincidence and the power of a well-turned word. But my clearest memory of that trip doesn’t have her in it at all.
It was nighttime. She was washing up before bed in the next room. Her mother looked up, sudden, especially considering how tired all of us were.
You know, I’m glad you’ll have each other in five, ten, thirty years, she told me. I really don’t see your friendship ending.
/
The truest part of me is every violent place I have filled with ivory and noise.
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Last year, two months after she left, she told me I had to listen to this album. Silfra. A collaboration between Hilary Hahn and Hauschka. A pianist and a violinist. Like us, I thought, but I was thinking to myself.
I should’ve known, really—she loved Hilary Hahn maybe even more than she loved Jane Austen, and she loved Jane Austen. Dutifully, I added the album to my ‘listen later’ playlist, telling myself I’d get around to it someday but not promising anything.
But I listened, more than I maybe should have with so much homework on my hands. I listened to each track with care because sometimes it becomes even more important to understand someone after they’ve left. It was something to remember her by, which was unnecessary, because we still talked, but essential, because we talked less.
The music felt rough but pure, a little off-putting at first, so sure of itself in its own quiet in a way I would never be. Unapologetic in its idiosyncrasies in a way that I’d been trying to master for years. The kind of music my family would make strange faces at whenever I got to pick what we listened to in the car. But the more I heard, the more I thought I understood. A good piece of music is nothing if not a place for your mind to latch onto, a place to latch onto your mind. And I held onto that album so fiercely, which is why, when the hurt at her absence came, it was easier not because of my habitual numbness but because she’d left me so much.
And again, we still talked. Change of tense: we still talk.
With every text, every grainy video call, she comes with ridiculous orchestra stories and new lessons she’s learning. She hated her new home at first, with the special kind of venom she usually reserves for fast food and overly friendly boys in ill-fitting concert dress, but she’s thrown herself into violin and schoolwork with a vengeance. Some days she comes out smiling, and that has to be okay for the time being. She’s so much closer to happy now, more immersed in her study of music than ever while I slowly lose touch with my own, miles and miles away.
When we message each other, I can pretend nothing’s changed. We still send each other all the good things we used to. Bad jokes our coaches and conductors make. Too many exclamation marks. Links to our favorite songs, new and old. (My proudest achievement in the past few years is getting her into Halsey’s Badlands.) So many book recommendations. Ugly photographs of pretty things. A hand from one, stretched across all that space, to help the other up and onward.
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Emotion as body as echo chamber. No way out and all the walls singing. You’re warm in this room, not sure how to move in this room. Everything is thick and bright. The gold dust of years all around you. The liquid strains of a violin on the wind. This is your better organ, your someday heart. It expects everything from the world. It expands around your scars. You’ve taught it all these little hurts. Brought it straight into the chorus and made it dance. There aren’t any wrong curves to learn, unlearn. Nothing you say is ever lost.
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(Searchlight Song is a column by Christina Im about the music behind identity: how it shapes us, explains us, and finds us when we are stumbling in the dark. This column, along with another by Half Mystic‘s editor-in-chief Topaz Winters and many more pieces by contributors, is published in Half Mystic‘s Issue II: SAUDADE. It is available for preorder now.)