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| Very blurry Jenny Lewis at The Met Philly, October 26, 2019 |
The world seems to be ending in a million ways. The Getty,
which seemed as eternal as any place I’ve ever been, might burn down. I spend
time worrying about the denizens of the 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning,
many of whom are probably long dead. In the grand scheme of things, there’s not
THAT MUCH I can do for Kamala Harris or Greta Thunberg. And Yet.
We see the dress before the lights come up, a movement
more than a color, a reflection of every kind of light, but unerringly,
unceasingly gold. So many different kinds of gold. Gold in every light, heating
up to pink or cooling to silver-edged shimmer, but always, always ALWAYS, gold,
gold, gold.
This whole situation, this band, this stage, these
multicolored neon landlines, this fancy new-fashioned chandelier, this
rosemary-flavored hard seltzer, it all seems like a miracle to me. Like, how does
anyone do anything? How does any driver ever make it where they’re going, never
mind the logistics of this whole show?
And yet, this perfect gift, the actual prettiest
person with her benediction of a voice. Somehow, out of all the world’s chaos,
art. Solid, still, shimmering. It’s why I visit the Hope Diamond after the
scariest protests, why I need to document nearly every flower. It’s important
to take it all in, to honor it, to metabolize it into something new. This beauty,
these perfect notes, this gold dress, this lifetime I’m in the middle of
living.
I sat in the balcony with my cool cousin-in-law and
her very ladylike friends, thinking yep, this is femme, and also thinking of
the nearly 20 years since Rilo Kiley became my favorite band, my favorite almost-anything.
Though married then, I lived on a shifting sand of
crushes, heartbreaks, and meltdowns. I played songs from beloveds’ MySpace
pages to be close to them a little, watching a little blinking star near the
cursor—I’m here, I’m someone, I’m someone else, I’m here in the world with you.
Though it seems like hometown, family, and true love
would have stabilized me, would have made me feel safe, I was in a constant
fight with the world to see if I belonged here, convinced that everything from
closet-mold to weather was a personalized indication that the world was trying
to push me out, that I would never be welcome anywhere.
I cried in the spring because I worried that I wasn’t
looking at the lilacs enough. I cried in the summer if it wasn’t warm enough to
go to the lake. I ate big salads with Amy on Sundays, read the paper, did the
crossword, went over to our best friend Marc’s apartment to watch the Simpsons.
I was in love with him too, and eventually that made us not friends, which
could be the title of my memoir.
Since then, I’ve lost so much, but, miracle and meds,
I’ve learned attachment. I’ve learned to (in my own extremely guarded way)
belong in the world. My friendship with Amy is a stronger foundation than
marriage ever could’ve been, a pedestal as important to me as the Statue of
Liberty’s base. I feel, in some sense, permanent, though still glimmering, ridiculous,
unsure.
Jenny’s voice and her gold dress plugged me back into
something unbalancing though, and utterly vital. The way a cute guy or a good
flower or a beautiful/sad documentary can grab me by the chin and face my attention
in the right direction, toward my most central truth: art persists. There never
wasn’t this ballroom, this flower, this gold dress.
And with that reminder, yearning comes back. Yearning
to be solid and quiet and loved but also to be knocked off balance by the sheer
force of gorgeousness, yearning for every destabilizing and grounding reminder
that I’m here, I’m here, I’m here.
