Nothing Ever Lasts Forever

Fleet Foxes - Blue Ridge Mountains

“I'm sure it'll be fine

I love you, I love you

Oh, brother of mine”

It is 2011, I am 15, and my older brother has moved eight hours north. It was the right move for his immediate family, but it breaks mine and my mother’s hearts regardless. Particularly because this also meant that my 3 year old nephew – my mom’s first grandchild – would no longer be living an easy 30 minutes from us. No more afternoon babysitting that involved splashing in the pool and watching Power Rangers and Finding Nemo. But their new home is beautiful; Mount Shasta, near the California-Oregon border. It snowed the night we arrived to help them move. We took flashlights out to watch as the delicate flakes fell between the tall pines and landed in our hair and on our coats. They will be fine. I’m sure of it. The homemade art hung on the wall, the half melted candles lit for dinners that go long into the night, the spices on the counter, and the cat nestled on the armchair in the living room all tell me so.

---

Lorde - Ribs

“I want ‘em back

The minds we had

It’s not enough to feel the lack

I want ‘em back,

I want ‘em.”

It’s the middle of April, 2012. We are eating rosemary chicken that has been too heavily salted for dinner. The sky is purple, the weather mild enough to open the sliding glass door. Through the window, I can see a planet coming over the horizon. One-hundred years ago, the Titanic sank. Tonight, my mother receives the worst phone call of her life.

Two states away, her little brother is dead.

She and another of her brothers drive all night to go there.

I have to wait for my dad to get off work so we can join them.

My uncle is dead, and I do not want to be in an empty house, so I take the bus to school.

I tell no one what happened, but I skip all of my classes and sit at a bench hidden in a corner.

I do not know it yet, but I will experience intense anxiety this year. I will be frightened and alone.

At the funeral, I stand there in the church, eyes glazed over, not completely sure if this is real. How do they really know that he is in the casket? Who are all of these people? Which one of them really knows what happened? Why won’t they let my uncle’s mother-in-law talk to my grandmother?

My aunt approaches me. She looks mad.

“You need to go be there for your mom.”

I float over to my mom’s general direction, and stand there.

I guess if someone is not sobbing, they aren’t sad, just rude.

There’s snow on the ground here. I’m relieved someone made potatoes au gratin – I don’t recall eating anything else on the trip.

When depression sinks in, I watch everything I love slip out of my hands.

Though this song would not come out for another year, the points at which Lorde begs for time to turn back strike me viscerally.

I want it all back, too.

---

Vallis Alps - Young

“And weeks went by but felt like hours

Seasons multiplying power

That I found in winter flowers”

It’s 2016, and I’m halfway through with community college. It’s a warm, spring afternoon, and I am sitting in the art lab, mixing my acrylics as the breeze comes in through the rolled open doors and this song plays over the speakers. I’d taken art classes my junior and senior years of high school, and wanted to continue that into college. This is an introductory painting class, and our assignment is to paint a visual based on songs that we choose. Our professor has put all of our songs onto a playlist and we listen to them while we work. This was not my song, but another girl’s. And yet it’s the one that takes me straight back to my days as a very young adult, the scent of paint heavy in the air, fans blowing to help dry the canvases hung on the walls, and of the sound of someone washing their brushes in the industrial sink. I think of how in the next building over, a semester earlier, I was in my first play. It was a small production, but I miss those table reads and the time spent with my castmates. I remember one night after rehearsals, I drove two of my new friends to town so we could buy makeup and face wash. A couple months later, one of those friends would do my makeup at his house before our big premiere. He had all of the high end stuff; Tarte for my foundation and Urban Decay setting spray. I remember so much light. Sunlight streaming into classrooms, the glare on my truck’s windshield, and the stage lights that would melt makeup and made it impossible to see the crowd. Look into the light, and watch your nerves vanish.

---

Fleet Foxes - The Shrine / An Argument

“And if I just stay a while here staring at the sea

And the waves break ever closer, ever near to me

I will lay down in the sand and let the ocean lead

Carry me to Innisfree like pollen on the breeze”

When our art professor told us about the project where we would paint our interpretations of a song, I knew immediately it would need to be a Fleet Foxes song. Their music has never failed to paint vivid pictures in my head. Many lyrics, including the aforementioned, inspired this image of a woman coming out of the ocean, waves clinging to her, coins in one hand and a green apple in the other, pollen floating away into the distance. The professor was a big fan of mixed media, and so I pulled leaves off of one of my mom’s artificial plants for the tree in my painting. The silver earrings and bracelets adorning the oceanic woman came from the foil off of gum wrappers. In high school, a friend and I spent hours peeling the foil from the paper of our 5 gum wrappers and using them to create mosaics on our binders. I miss our friendship, but I know that we are different people now. We needed each other for the fleeting moment that is high school, and now I can reflect on those memories. Leaving campus to get sub sandwiches, accidentally backing my truck into a gas pump, visiting a modern art museum, and being the only two students in the “intermediate drawing” class. I can still hear the pencil scratching on the paper while he shades the tyrannosaurus rex he sketched, or the zipper on his backpack being opened as he reaches for another stick of gum.

“Can I have the wrapper?” I ask.

He rolls his eyes, faux exasperation. “Yeah, I guess.”

---

Tears For Fears - Everybody Wants to Rule the World

“It's my own design

It's my own remorse

Help me to decide

Help me make the

Most of freedom and of pleasure

Nothing ever lasts forever

Everybody wants to rule the world”

It’s the summer of 2017, and I have moved out of my parents home. My partner and I lived with a friend of his who had already been in this new city for a year. We moved so my partner could go to college, and I would soon join him to finish up my Bachelor’s.

It’s late at night, and we are at the grocery store for ice cream. As I am checking out, pressing the numbers on the pin pad, my stomach drops. I have come to be a little more familiar with this sensation, but I still do not know what it is. We race home, my mind barrelling a thousand miles an hour. I stick my key in the front door, and begin to hyperventilate. I do not know it yet, but I am developing one of the most debilitating ailments I have ever known; panic disorder. Their frequency has increased, the violent hold on my mind and body growing vicious, digging its talons into me.

This song plays as I drive in the rain, city lights illuminating the water droplets, my eyelids heavy but my body flooded with adrenaline.

I am standing in the middle of my aunt’s street in the dark, my head buzzing, calling my mom to tell her that I am dropping out of school.

She replied, simply, “No, you aren’t.”

I never did drop out, but it had nothing to do with that conversation.

I found community within one of my classes, and from the community, I learned resilience. I recalled my great-grandmother telling me just a couple of years ago, “I wish I could have gone to school. I wanted to go, but my parents made me get married.”

She was sixteen.

I was twenty-one, and I had everything that I needed to push my way through school.

All those times stepping out of class to catch my breath, nights sobbing in my car, and frequently running away from campus, I still managed to keep going.

I did it. I have my Bachelor’s.

So many of the women in my family did not have these choices.

The packet of pills in my purse to help me choose when I want to be a mother is nothing short of powerful and miraculous; they did not have those.

The debit card with my name on it, attached to the bank account which I put money in and am the only one who can access it; they did not have that.

I recognize this panic, this anxiety, this depression, was all passed down to me. It was always going to sink its fangs into me eventually. But I have tools my ancestors did not; it is within my power to use them, to make the most of them.

Someone has to break the curse.

---

The Oh Hellos - Dear Wormwood

“There before the threshold

I saw a brighter world beyond myself”

Summer of 2022. It’s late at night, my string lights are plugged in, and I am lazily scrolling through my phone in my room. I get an email notification that I have a new private message on a writing forum I used to be active in. I know who this is, and I jump up to grab my laptop. My heart is racing as I log in to the site and open the message from my long lost friend: “Hey! It’s been ages.” It had, in fact, been three whole years. She had gotten nostalgic reading through old messages, and decided to reach out. I was ecstatic; this had been my first real Internet friend, and someone I had shared so much of my work with. After some brief pleasantries (because who has time for small talk when an old friend who you missed contacts you), she invited me to join a small writing Discord. By luck, I had just started using it earlier in the year, and I took a leap and joined.

It may sound strange, but it was a life-changing decision in the best way. I had my old friend back as well as some new ones, and my writing took off. The draft that had not yet broken 90k skyrocketed to over 100k in no time. We spend hours discussing characters and arcs and tropes. We share the highs and lows of regular life. Simply, we are there for each other. I will always associate this song with her and one of my favorite characters of hers, as she said it perfectly encapsulated part of his arc. I am happy forever that she chose to reach out that random July night.

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Asian Glow and Weatherday - Look Alive, Sunshine

“Look alive, sunshine

Take care of yourself

They can spot the dark spots

Underneath your eyes

They can hear that you're

Not quite fully here”

It’s the fall of 2022, and it’s time for my final semester of graduate classes. My partner and I moved to this city at the beginning of the year so I could finally join my cohort in person. We were now nearly four hours from home, three more than I had ever lived away. Intentionally, I had loaded each semester fully to get in and out of the city as fast as possible. It was expensive, it was crime-riddled, and I was scared. The singular saving grace was I now lived an easy thirty minutes from my brother and his family. But on those commutes to campus for my evening class, it was just me on the highway and the midtown streets. This song was part of one of my favorite driving playlists, and often started just as I reached the off-ramp to abandon the hectic flow of traffic and wind down before I got to campus. I could have taken the highway the entire way to campus, but I enjoyed watching the sunset glint off of the skyscrapers. Not only that, but I often had a chance to view the softer side of humanity, to remind myself it was not always utter chaos and police helicopter blades whirring overhead. There were rows of trees along the street that I watched shift from green to gold and red to barren. An elderly couple stopped on the sidewalk to admire a cream colored cat sitting in someone’s windowsill. A young couple shared a quick kiss as they waited for their turn in the crosswalk. Passersby stop to help the driver of a wrecked car. A church with a large Pride flag that announced all were welcome. People sat out on the patios of restaurants, chatting and sipping their drinks.

My classes started when the sun was still out, but ended well into darkness once October rolled around. I always found another girl to share where I parked, and let her know she should park near me so we could walk back together. That, or I could drive her to her car. I genuinely did not mind. It gave me peace to see my classmates get into their car safely, headlights on as they backed out of their space and drove home. My first semester, I was shy and took a while to ask other girls about where they parked. So, I would often find myself walking across campus myself, an open knife up my coat sleeve, my stride purposeful, eyes shifting, even if I would have been too nervous to actually see anyone in the darkened spots. No one should feel that way. I don’t want other people to feel like that, and that is what eventually allowed me to summon the courage to reach out.

I hope I gave them a little relief as well.

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Lorde - Oceanic Feeling

“Oh, was enlightenment found?

No, but I'm tryin', takin' it one year at a time

Oh, oh, can you hear the sound?

It's shimmerin' higher

On the beach, I'm buildin' a pyre

I know you'll show me how, I'll know when it's time

To take off my robes and step into the choir”

It is January of 2023. I am driving to the hospital to see my grandmother after she had a terrible fall at home. Lorde is the only thing that will steady my nerves while I make the 45 minute drive.

I don’t remember what our last conversation was, but I am positive that it ended with “I love you”. They always did.

My mom always told me how important it is to end conversations with loved ones that way, for the exact reason of, “That may be the last time that you speak.” I have never, ever regretted this practice.

Even on the phone, I could hear my grandmother smile when she said, “Ohhkay, I just wanted to say hi and see what you were doing. I love you. I’ll talk to you later. Bye now.”

I bet I have voicemails from her on my old phone. I do not know if I will be more heartbroken if I do, or if I don’t. Either way, I have not yet mustered the courage to check.

I’ll know when the time is right. As summer now rolls around, her old kitchen table is now in mine, holding my two parlor palms, a dish of wrapped Christmas cookies, and the Pendleton blanket that I held onto when I had a phone interview recently. That specific blanket holds feminine energy as it was gifted to me by a woman, and that was the kind of strength I needed to get through the phone call. The kind of strength that women who have your back can give you. I think my grandmother would be very pleased to know that it was at her kitchen table that I had this interview for an internship, and that I was pushed through to the next round at it.

There is still so much to do. I have to keep on going.

"I know you're scared, so was I

But all will be revealed in time."