Nonfiction, Lalini Shanela Ranaraja
We are walk-running down Claremont Canyon the evening you say to me Sufjan Stevens. It’s my second year in California, I haven’t read the lore, and I can’t quite catch all the threads this confession should let me hitch to your soul – but I have an inkling, and that night after skirting the cop cars outside the station, I play My Little Red Fox four times before bed. It’s October, and Javelin bloomed on our third date – lip of the Pacific, warmest day of the season, salt grass after sunset and hummingbird kisses – but in the time we’re together it doesn't enter your canon, maybe because you’ve disavowed all frivolities, maybe because it’s something else you’re guarding. It’s too early for falling in love with my beloved’s beloveds, the way I have in previous lives – track and field, chickpea quiche, hiragana, astronomy – but Stevens pens an essay in ten parts, My Love Is A Weapon Thrown Onto The Oblivion Of Your Body, and I spend most of my twenty-sixth birthday trying to drink peach wine and dog-earing each printed page. The machine delivers them backwards with half the vignettes disappeared, and I decide to add the missing words by hand, thinking queer faithful poet from Michigan thinking Michigan which borders Illinois and Indiana which raised versions of each of us thinking here is someone else braiding a ladder of bright-burning thoughts and hauling us after him rung by rung into unfurling air. In those months we share a magpie courtship – old world seeds smuggled in ragged suitcase lining, incense blossoming rainbow ribbons – and I tell myself I’m saving these pages for the day I need to be overt in my devotion, but there’s a corner of my soul that sinks its claws in the upturned throat of this illusion – first contact with a facet of your story that you don’t yet know.
And yes, that’s the same week we’re dancing in the forest. My intentions are to dance, but I tell you yoga, I tell you forest, but we end up on the loamy earth where the memorial grove runs out, discovering each other upside down. I named the playlist la playa. I don’t know why exactly. We were three miles from the beach, and you were the one who’d learned Spanish. Perhaps I was invoking Javelin and the spirit of the third date. Perhaps it was the circlet of loamy sand, all the moves we made etched in our wake. Perhaps it was my heels calling home to the island and the waters that will always be warm. I play Neptune from Planetarium, and as the first chords ring through the redwoods you say I love this song. So much of my time with you I spend obscuring my affiliations with Americanisms you eschew – Top 40 hits, smartphones, subscriptions – but I love this song is the most normal thing you’ve said in weeks and my chameleon skin blooms sandstone warm.
I don’t remember what it’s like to invent movement in your arms – it was only the once and I don’t know, anymore, if it was something you wanted truly or just a consequence of my machinations, but that is the night I say if I’m tethering you I just want you to tell me and you pull me across the blanket with sudden urgency and say promise me you won’t let me just throw us away for no reason and on the last verse of Neptune Stevens sings so if you won’t hold me, I have no objections, and neither of us kept our promise.
We were children eight years and nine thousand miles apart. I have no dearth of questions I wish I’d asked about your beginnings, but it’s just me now, so this is my side of it: when I was eleven the war ended and my world opened up. I was in the seventh grade and the US Top 40 was an emerging currency, and yes, the first song I recognized on the radio was Taylor Swift’s Love Story. I didn’t have your philosophies or your pedigree, but each week forty songs taught me what supposedly spoke to your country. Beyoncé, Bennington, Swift, Halsey. I played Planetarium before Carrie & Lowell because Bryce Dessner was partly responsible for evermore, and thus the nights I spent on a blue bench swing in Illinois listening to seven through knotted headphones, July air thickening with fireflies and derechos. Who were these Dessner men? What else had they made? I didn’t feel the need to know. What I wish I knew is how you grew to love Neptune. In your first world, like mine, music was five loaves and two fishes and then our worlds were rearranged and the loaves and the fishes became the deluge. How did you choose to consume? I never saw you listen to music you called your own. Technology was the angel you had wrestled and declared a fearsome equal, before you picked its wings apart and left behind the pieces that most resembled you. There was a guitar in the corner of your room and I never saw you play it, but once before you stirred awake I danced my fingers down its ribs, and they carried no dust.
We spent part of our last night together painting by the light of my west-facing window. The story I tell is that neither of us knew it was our last night together. I keep one eye on the play queue, heading off at the pass whoever I think might trouble the water – Shakira, Rihanna, Pritam, Kygo. It’s not my first time curating the chords or winnowing the kaleidoscope to Vance Joy, Hazlett, Einaudi, Lord Huron, and you don’t seem to notice. But then John My Beloved, and since October I’ve played Carrie & Lowell often enough to hold a few lines in my heart. Enough to sing along on the threshold of hearing, and something happens in your body in that moment – wakening, shapeshifting, realizing – and I remember too late that the easiest lines to hold are the most honest, but it’s not yet our season for being honest, and still I sing I love you more than the world can contain in its lonely and ramshackle head. Sufjan braids ropes of magnesium truths and here I am looping them round my neck. I fell in love with my beloved’s beloveds, and it’s not the first time – Avi Kaplan, Dawit Tsige, Khalid, Kodaline – but this could be the time that costs me most dearly. In the end, the day never arrives when I need to be overt in my devotion, and the essay in ten parts lives in my closet, tucked into the closing chapter of The Sound of Waves.
Eight years and nine thousand miles between us, and I wish I’d known to tell you from the start that this was my call and response. How do you learn to love them? You learn what they love. I played Neptune when I meant I know I can’t keep you. I played John My Beloved when I meant you are becoming precious to me. I never played My Little Red Fox, because I would have meant nothing more than kiss me with the fire of gods, and it was not a time for being my most open. I was born in the mountains of an island on the equator; you were born in a town where everyone was your neighbor, Midwest ranging round you for mile on green mile. I think we were trying the best we could to find a common tongue. You said Sufjan and I asked you to dance to Neptune. In the months after you, the people who loved me asked me why I was so many people to so many people. I thought of my Illinois years in the house with the blue bench swing and the playlists I sang my way through while the cast of beloveds rotated the earth in the other room. What if I hadn’t headed them off at the pass? Would we have surprised ourselves with tongues we held in common? Would the people we were before we met have known each other all along?
Six months after we spun apart, I find the record made by Dessner men to accompany KiKi Layne’s Dandelion. I pay a pilgrimage to the cinema, wearing jeans that once spent nights on your floor and the shirt I buttoned the morning after laying hands on your guitar. It’s a Thursday matinee with three other people and my eyes blur so often I hitch glasses to my collar, the way I used to do when I wanted you to kiss me. Here it is, Neptune’s cinematic kin. How do you learn to love them? You learn what they love. You, walk-running down Claremont Canyon, making a confession that led back to your soul; me, coal-eyed at the Thursday matinee, finally finding something I could have given you.
Here’s a version of us. One of them is Dandelion and it’s her film and she is brilliant and raw and blazing. One of them is Casey and watching him wrecks me because the only way he could have resembled you more is if you’d played him. I never heard you sing or watched your hands on guitar strings, but I feel as though I did. In one of the frames he’s weeping, hunched into his hands and spittling, and I never saw you weep, but I feel as though I did. In one of the frames her eyes burn and she asks him are we gonna be okay, like I never asked you, like I wish I did.
Here’s a vision of us. You meet someone and the fire in them calls to the fire in you. You take each other to the trees to hear yourselves breathe. Your blood sings in kaleidoscope voices but together you are an impossibility for which you’ve searched the world. Together you are the polyphony – but you pick pieces of yourselves even as you pick yourselves to pieces. You offer what you think the other will heed. The zest and not the pith. Flesh not seeds. Roots not leaves. Is there enough truth there to hold you both together?
I fall in love with my beloved’s beloveds. Where does the lightning fork, between the life and the lore? Because, in a magpie courtship, you lay so much ground for lore – eucalyptus and marigolds, smuggled seeds and rosemary, incense blooms and pomegranate shawls. The Sound of Waves was the last thing you gave me. At the time I didn’t know it by name – you’d pared off the covers and papered them over and I’d never read a book without provenance before. It was one of your illusions I did not question. It was the night of John My Beloved. Was that when you began to unravel? We thought we were together, but were we really just wrestling our disparate angels? I know their winged chorus could engulf the earth, but I keep chiseling out your very last battle, your event horizon, the thunderstrike when lore became canon. Could you see it coming? Did you catch me in the act? The night of John My Beloved, I made a confession – heartsongs, eleven, handwritten. Was it better or worse than the patchworked My Love Is A Weapon Thrown Onto The Oblivion Of Your Body? Did I need no one’s words but my own to become overt in my devotion? You, walk-running down Claremont Canyon; me, singing low on the threshold of hearing. Did the lightning strike canon or lore? Maybe we don’t get to know.
On our second date you showed me a grove, hidden high in the Oakland hills. It was soundless in a way I’d forgotten. The sun made saints of the redwoods and they burred to themselves on the peripheries of our understanding. I found the grove again the day after Dandelion. I stitched my spine to the tilting earth and played Mercury – Mercury which ends Planetarium which Neptune began. Here is someone else braiding love and pain and memory and faith and soaring skywards. Does it matter if we are lore or canon to each other? I hope you forgive me for granting you the roots but never the leaves. I hope I forgive you for unmaking your confessions. I will not ask forgiveness for loving your beloveds, no matter how it cost me, but I will ask your forgiveness for guarding my beloveds, and what it might have cost you.
I’m from the mountains of an island on the equator. You’re from a Midwest town where everyone is your neighbor. How do you learn them? You learn what they love. Perhaps it was inauspicious, meeting in the year I was polishing my Americana, the year you’d begun disavowing most of what you are. Maybe Planetarium was too much of your past. Maybe I didn’t give you enough of mine to love. Maybe I should have said I don’t have your philosophies, but movement moves me. A beat to burn across the floorboards of that falling-down house in the pandemic derecho. Words plain enough to fly from my lips while spicing dahl for my cast of beloveds. No, they weren’t phrased as burning-bright truths carved through shimmering ether. We had Kendrick, Khalid, Burna Boy, Major Lazer; when they told the truth they were brazen in the telling. But when the world was ending they fed us. When we were broken they gave us back our blood. One of the songs I will move to forever is Major Lazer’s Particula. I play it to start everyone dancing. It's brash and victorious and momentary and illusionary and for me it makes a world of kente and lehengas, braids and bangles, sunset glow on bare raised laughing arms, and I never once imagined you there.
Here’s what I was always afraid of asking – isn’t it exhausting, to starve yourself of so many common tongues? Aren’t you lonely, living so far from a vernacular shared and sung? What’s left of wanting, when we’ve picked it all to pieces? Aren’t you hungry, sweetbird?
Maybe, before we made lore of each other, we should have created canon. Maybe before leaving Neptune in search of Dandelion, I should have confessed to communing with your country, to devouring the US Top 40 via the antique boombox in my grandfather’s study, every weekend for most of my childhood. I don’t know what you can’t live without, because I didn’t ask, but for me this is the world – an island, an airplane, a continent, a grocery store, a cab ride, a kitchen and the play queueing, the needle dropping, the kids down the hall propping their phones in their slides to cry to Khalid in the shower, the septuagenarians at the plaza bopping to Shakira – and we can’t live without it. And maybe you’re right and maybe all of this ends one day and maybe we’ll burn in the light by which we’ll be judged – but wouldn’t you rather go singing, sweetbird? Wouldn’t you rather holler the plain brash words and see smiles on the faces of the folks in line behind you, back for a moment in the kitchen, in the cab, in the candle aisle, at the boarding gate, in the one-horse town, on the island, in the mountains, beside the antique boombox – before they went forth to wrestle their angels?
Sweetbird, wouldn’t that be enough?
Lalini Shanela Ranaraja makes art in a wilderness of places, most recently Katugastota (Sri Lanka), Rock Island (Illinois) and the California Bay Area. They have written about defiant women, red-tailed hawks, best beloveds, mothertongues and luminous worlds for Wildness, Hunger Mountain, Strange Horizons and others. Discover more of their work at www.shanelaranaraja.com.