Not Even The Warping Kind

The Magnetic Fields: 'I Don't Want to Get Over You'

Presenting the first ever Tracks on Tracks guest essay: Becca Rothfeld on teen yearning, Gchat romance, and nostalgia for the past she once longed to escape.

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I haven’t spoken to my mother since 2017, and it has been a good deal longer than that since I have ventured back to my childhood home, an unremarkable brick house with a shrieking red door in the northwest quadrant of Washington, DC. I don’t miss my volatile mother so much as I miss that house, which has grown mythological in my memory. When I lived there it was loud, and it often echoed with a discordant chorus of anger, but when I enter it in my dreams it is always steeped in silence. 

I remember that it was always cold inside, even in the summer, and that the curtains in the dining room were long and white. On the rare occasions when I was alone there, the quiet seemed to enhance the configurations the dust built and disassembled in the beams canted through the windows. And there was the red velvet sofa, and the blue and white armchair, and the lamp with the long cord, and the poems I taped to the walls of my room and that have, no doubt, been peeled off and tossed away. The stair that creaked and had to be stepped over; the refrigerator’s labored hum; the way the key twisted into the lock and stuck a little on the leftwards torque. Even now I sometimes wake up and believe, for a moment, that I am in that house I hated and am so shocked to miss, with the dogwood tree tapping at the panes of the window above my bed. I may never see it again.

Last year I moved back to DC, albeit to a different part of the city, and I often succeed in convincing myself, if only for a moment, that I am just hours away from bursting through the red door once more. Where I live, in the Northeast, a quadrant I never visited when I was growing up, the scenery is largely the same. I am still surrounded by the obscene abundance of the mid-Atlantic in the spring, when the days are soupy with humidity and the flowers are emphatic. DC is insolently beautiful at this time of year. The exuberance of the azaleas, the heavy drip of the wisteria, the bright lace of the lilacs — I recognize all of it, or rather my body does. I have lived in New Hampshire, New York, London, Berlin, and Boston, and I have tried to love them, but what my flesh remembers is the white wash of the midday sun, the damp pungency of the mossy dirt, the silver machinery of the mosquitos, the heat softening as the light falls, the burnt smell of some unimaginably normal person grilling in the distance.

I used to walk at this magic hour when the sun set, watching the windows lighting up and changing into squares of floating gold. This was when I was 16 or 17, the age I can't quite manage to outgrow in my conception of myself. At that indelible age, I walked. I walked a lot, sometimes for hours, in an effort to escape the house to which I can never return. I was bent on escape: nearly every weekend I competed in debate tournaments in different states, and in the interim I talked to my debate friends on Gchat or AIM and imagined I was with them. Most often, I talked to a boy who lived in Texas, whom I’d met at debate camp and whom I loved with such scorching intensity that even the memory of it makes me flinch. When I wasn’t talking to him, I was gathering offerings (poems, songs) to send  him later, gathering things being a way of extracting yourself from events as they happen. And then there was my best refuge, books, which I read with an avidity I fear I can never recover, like someone sucking juice out of a fruit. 

Sometimes I think that I will never be anyone but this person, a 16-year-old with racoon eyeliner and chapped lips and four dog-eared books in my backpack, listening to The Magnetic Fields on an iPad, giddy over the absurd effulgence of DC in April, feeling the brilliant world brightened by love for a boy in a faraway state who talked about books with me online. And sometimes I think that I could not be more distant from this intimate stranger, who lived in a world of enchantments that I can no longer access, in a house where I am no longer allowed.

But not much can give you the visceral gift of yourself like music. Since moving back to DC, I’ve been listening to the Magnetic Fields again, to the 1999 album I first discovered during the year when I was in a constant conversation with the Texan and that I returned to during our protracted break-up. Track Six on 69 Love Songs, “I Don’t Want to Get over You,” is a decidedly adolescent song, and I don’t mean this pejoratively. I only mean that it’s emotionally raw and ravening in a way I’ve forgotten how to be, probably to my credit. The song’s narrator knows that he has the impulses of a teenager: he admits it when he considers avowedly juvenile remedies for his heartbreak. I could make a career of being blue, he croons, I could dress in black and read Camus, smoke clove cigarettes and drink vermouth, like I was 17. And indeed, this verse conjures an unfortunately accurate portrait of me as a 17-year-old, when the Texan had gone off to college and stopped replying to my Gchats, when I watched Godard films and smoked clove cigarettes in hopes of becoming older and Frencher than I was. 

But the song’s speaker does not go in for these youthful consolations. Instead, he opts for the most defiantly adolescent strategy of all: he refuses to get over it. He demands what I demanded when I was 16 and convinced that all my euphorias and agonies would — or should — last forever. I could listen to my therapist, pretend you don’t exist, and not have to dream of what I dream of, he continues. I could listen to all my friends, and go out again, and pretend it’s enough. But he doesn’t, because, as he puts it, I don’t want to get over love. Adolescents know what the rest of us conveniently forget: that love involves not just a first-order commitment to a place or person, but also a second-order commitment to remain committed forever.

Of course,  you can get over love. This is the tragedy of adult life. You can leave the originary places and people for good, or they can leave you, and you can survive it. Morty’s Delicatessen, the dingy diner where I got gloppy blintzes when I cut classes in high school, has been replaced by an office development; the Texan is married to someone else, and so am I; the house with the red door is closed to me, probably forever. I could forget it, all of it. I could dress in black and read Camus. I did, for a while. In high school, I thought I was miserable; I thought that when I reached the improbable age of 30 (now two years ago) and became a world-famous author (not quite) and never had to speak to my mother again (this part, at least, came to pass) I would be overjoyed, and I would not for a moment wallow in nostalgia for an era I experienced as a years-long wound. But it turns out I don’t really want to get over the legends of my life, or to flee the places where I was first and most irreparably at home, no matter how unhappily.

I don’t want to get over love, not even the warping kind. Not really. So I keep walking around DC, listening to the Magnetic Fields, not quite getting over it, picking at a scab that I hope never heals. ✹

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Becca Rothfeld is the non-fiction book critic at the Washington Post. Her first book of essays, All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess, was published in April by Metropolitan Books.

(Whenever you buy a book using a link from a Tracks essay, I receive a small commission.)

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Also:

• Last week I wrote about using Belle and Sebastian’s “Get Me Away From here, I’m Dying” as the soundtrack to both a decade of moving around and a decade of staying put.

On deck:

• Paul Simon at Occupy Wall Street.

• Screamo in suburban LA.

• Crying at the movies with Nina Simone.

• And … more!