Love, grief, and The Magnetic Fields

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I've heard it said that if you're feeling nervous you can turn it around by framing it as excitement. I've tried, and that tactic often works. Those two emotions sitting side by side, overlapping just enough to make the leap between them easier.

Grief and love are similarly close, sometimes bumping up against one another in unexpected and complicated ways. Like turning nerves into excitement, framing grief as "love with no place to go" can ease that feeling at the pit of your stomach.

Bittersweet songs can be reminders of where grief and love sit near one another, and they tend to be my favorite. They're the place where the joy of something you once loved can turn into an anxious pain you can't shake. They ride that line between the two sentiments, holding space for both.

I haven't written many traditional, joyous devotional love songs. But I'd argue that processing the grief of relationships can be an equal expression of love. After all, you wouldn't argue with someone if a part of you didn't love them. If I didn't think there was a sliver of joy to salvage, I wouldn't be wading through sadness to reach it.

I've traveled that road many times with the company of one of my oldest and best friends who found her way to Los Angeles recently. We are both coincidentally in a liminal time of life, in between the stop and start of who we know ourselves to be. Waiting for grief to turn back into love.

In college we would sit in her bedroom and sing "Papa Was a Rodeo" by The Magnetic Fields as if we had the life experience to back up the longing and sadness of 69 Love Songs. Those songs filled with as much adoration as heartbreak were exactly that - love songs - circling the sentiment from all angles.

It set the stage in our young adult lives to see the things we loved from many sides, still wanting to build careers in creative fields despite the love of it costing us sleep and sanity and security. We've ended up living on opposite sides of the world taking big swings for the big feelings we used to sing about while getting ready to go dancing.

We somehow always find our way back to the optimistic, hopeless romantic kids we were then, still are, even though the wall between love and the abyss of everything else wears thinner as the years go by.

There's a valuable perspective there when things that were once euphoric collide with distress. It's the bittersweet, the love and grief together, that can illuminate things. Teenage me, listening to "Grand Canyon" in their dorm room, didn't know that yet. But I know I'll find the right lyric, the right combination of feelings some day, and we'll get ready to go dancing again.

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