Taking Off

Songs: Ohia: 'Farewell Transmission'

‘Sometimes a song finds you, feels like the only thing you can hear.‘ Marianela D’Aprile remembers a fateful drive to the beach soundtracked by a single miraculous track, played again and again and again.

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I drove to the beach that day because I could feel my belief slipping away. I had believed, possibly up until that morning, that what F and I were doing was love. I had convinced myself that my capacity for happiness, for original thought, my appetite, my creativity, my wit, my humor, my intelligence, my looks — all were products of my love for him, and his for me. I’m not sure what he thought. In retrospect, I was mostly having this experience by myself, inside a cage he had created.

The whole place is dark.

It was late September, just on the verge of too cold. I had packed a small bag — water, blanket, sunglasses — and thrown it into the back of a gray hatchback I’d borrowed from a neighbor. I think I wanted to drive away from the pain that seemed to fill my house, take the huge knot of it and deposit it into the water. I don’t know what made me play “Farewell Transmission.” I’m not sure if I chose it consciously; I think it might have been a suggestion from my phone. Sometimes a song finds you, feels like the only thing you can hear.

I remember gripping the wheel of the car, pressing on the gas pedal, moving forward on the highway. The song builds up from nothing to a soar — otherworldly wailing guitar, orchestral strings, warbling choral vocals, loud drums — then lands somewhere far from where it started. Jason Molina’s voice weaves through it all like a river looking for an outlet. (If the track sounds like a miracle, it’s because it is: the recording was improvised; what you hear on the record is a song hanging together thanks to nothing but its own momentum.) I played it again and again, the sound ripping through the speakers, the left one tinny from overuse.

All the great, set-up hearts, all at once, start to beat.

I fell asleep on the beach. When I woke up, the folds of the blanket were imprinted into the side of my face. I took a picture. I still have it. My face is a little swollen, a little red from the cold and the sand, and there are two lines across my left cheek. My hair is long and dark behind me. I look like someone who’s just been robbed. I also took a video of the waves lapping onto a narrow section of the beach, thinking that was how I wished to feel — continuous, free of thought, bound only to my own motion. Now, whenever I hear “Farewell Transmission,” especially when I play it on my guitar and sing it myself, I feel like I’m taking off.

We will try and know whatever we try; we will be gone, but not forever.

I drove back in silence. I think I ended it that night, or maybe the next day. F said he would miss me. On the way out from the beach I had seen a couple and their wedding party having pictures taken in front of the welcome center. I thought about them in their flip flops, just out of season, too cold for the bride’s strapless dress. Their friends and family crowded around, bearing witness to the declaration of what already existed between them. I thought about how the couple’s love was full, too, of the love of that mass of people.

My kind of life’s no better off, if it’s got the maps or if it’s lost.

F’s and my love, by contrast, was empty. Sealed up in its cage, wanting of witnesses — it was impossible to tell whether it existed at all. ✹

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Marianela D’Aprile is a writer living and working in New York City. She is the deputy editor of the New York Review of Architecture.

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A question:

• Do you — yes, you! — have a song you will forever associate with a breakup? Drop it on the comments. I’ve been delighted to see people sharing memories there: it feels like a throwback to a very different era of online community, and it also encourages Substack to put the piece in front of more readers.

Also:

• This isn’t the first Tracks with a breakup in it. That was Joanna Frieda Mulder, whose piece on Sara Groves featured two breakups.

• This isn’t the first Tracks piece with a song being played over and over again. That was me, remembering how I played the same Broken Social Scene song almost every morning for a year.

• Tracks has published enough pieces now that, when you go to TracksOnTracks.Substack.com it looks vaguely like a “real” web magazine, especially on a desktop or laptop. Good feeling.