IX: Synaesthesia | Searchlight Song: "Green Light"
I’m waiting for it, that green light, I want it—
It’s August and the slow world of summer is ending, the first summer in three years that I haven’t been heartbroken. It’s an odd kind of relief, one mixed with disappointment: a single June to myself and I already couldn’t stand the boredom. I live in a city full of interesting things to do, but somehow it feels sacrilegious to go anywhere alone. Re-downloading Tinder at the height of summer was part last resort, part reflex (because so often the former is also the latter). What can I say except that I wanted that mystifying familiarity of meeting a person I only knew from photos on the Internet. To take off my name yet still be more than a stranger.
A friend once told me they were surprised I still go on Tinder dates given all the stories—most of them fairly questionable—I’ve brought back afterward. If I’m being honest, I think I go less for the dates and more for the walk back to my apartment. Where I live in Philadelphia, there are a handful of streets named after trees: walnut, spruce, pine, elm. There are also actual trees lining the streets, but none of them match their names. That’s how it feels, heading home and getting there without knowing how, my body trained in the muscle memory of place. You can walk and walk and not even register that you’re moving until suddenly you’ve arrived.
On one of my walks home, the traffic lights paused green on every street corner. I was thinking about the person I’d just met up with, how I didn’t plan to see them again. I only noticed the color by how it happened to me; from where I stood, I was surrounded by a forest of light. Beneath it, my skin greened like a coin passed through too many hands. I was supposed to go. I was supposed to walk across the street and keep walking until I got home, but I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and thought only of Lorde’s song “Green Light” and how I used to want nothing more than for someone to break my heart.
No matter how many years or miles you put between yourself and a memory, all it takes is a song. A song returns you to yourself like nothing else.
/
I came out the same summer as Lorde’s album Melodrama. I was seventeen going on eighteen. Pure Heroine, her debut, had been released my freshman year of high school. That year, “Royals” found its way onto West York Area High School’s atrium turned homecoming dance floor, boomed from speakers into the air above the track. And though it gradually vanished from the radio, Pure Heroine became the soundtrack to my suburban discontent over the next three years. I listened to Lorde because I hated going to a high school that other people didn’t hate going to because they really believed we were in the best years of our lives. Because I hated that all of my friends had boyfriends or girlfriends, while I had to keep my want for the safety of the three-hour drive from my rural Pennsylvania town to college.
When I say being out in high school hadn’t seemed like a possibility, I mean this in the most basic of terms. I didn’t know any queer or trans Asians. I didn’t use words like “queer” or “trans” because I didn’t know what they meant to other people, which is to say that I didn’t really know what they meant at all. I couldn’t imagine anyone in my town—queer or otherwise—wanting to date an Asian person, anyways. There didn’t seem to be much of a point to coming out. I could announce my desire, but it wouldn’t make anyone desire me back. Instead I would crawl into bed, staring at the ceiling, my pulse humming to the throb of Lorde’s music. In the way of high school, I was always outside of love, never in it.
/
When “Green Light,” the lead single of Melodrama, was released three months ahead of the rest of the album, I was so close to the rest of my life. Before “Green Light,” I thought queer wanting sutured you to someone else, and this gave you a new name. I thought love was the end goal of this new name. Love was supposed to make my queerness an act, instead of just a theory I read about on the Internet. But then I listened to Lorde sing about wanting without directing it towards a person. I watched her dance on top of a car chauffeuring her around the city, watched her feral and defiant desire in an empty parking lot flooded with red light, and I decided that this was what I’d been chasing after all this time. Not to be loved but to have my heart broken. To want someone and then move on from that wanting.
Of course, it didn’t go like this. The year I came to college, my heart broke. There was no car for me to dance on top of, so instead I made a playlist for a person I’d never dated and cried in my dorm shower. My heart broke again that summer, and once more the next year. I never made a new playlist, just added more songs to the first. Each time, I walked around the city wondering what would inevitably hurt more: ending up alone or loving someone all over again. Because I know no other way to fall than to fall hard, and because I was only now coming to the understanding that my life wasn’t a music video. Want was all I could think to name.
/
There’s something agonizing about the inevitability in the line but honey, I’ll be seeing you wherever I go, near the end of “Green Light.” I thought being queer and out would make me less lonely—as if the sheer fact of desire could shield anyone from feeling like their body was meant only for one unbearably distant thing. What it did instead was reveal just how inescapably small my queer community of mostly non-men was. By now, the likelihood of dating someone who hasn’t already dated one of my exes is almost nonexistent.
It’s worth noting that this sense of what might be described as intimate care at its best and incestuous claustrophobia at its worst persists regardless of geography. It doesn’t matter if I live in Philadelphia or the town where I grew up. Lesbian culture is defined by our inability to refuse the people we’ve loved from our lives, because we are—more often than not—each other’s only unconditional family.
Lorde repeats I can’t let go over and over again in the chorus, and I think of how letting go doesn’t feel like a real choice when some fragment of the past will always have a hold on the future. Maybe this is the price we pay for keeping as many people precious to us as we can in this life—this beautifully cruel life that gives us love and takes it away without calling any of it spectacular. In fact, this is what makes us ordinary. You will go to the same bar, the same therapist’s office, the same King Princess or Mitski or girl in red concert. You will wear the same Doc Martens in different sizes. You will kiss the same people and take the same bus home because you both live in the part of town that has a farmer’s market every Saturday. You will see each other there, glance for a second too long, and say nothing. You will be lonely in precisely the same key.
An evening ends with a field of mosquito bites on my thigh, night just beginning to pour itself across my neck. I know that exiting a stranger’s home begins with entering. When they take me home, I memorize the door, so I can find my way out without having to ask. I don’t say goodbye. I know we’ll see each other again.
(Searchlight Song is a column by Erin Jin Mei O’Malley 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 two more by the HM team and dozens more pieces of art, music, and writing by contributors, is published in Half Mystic Journal’s Issue IX: Synaesthesia. It is available for preorder now.)