Half of the Time We’re Gone But We Don’t Know Where
Loneliness, Garden State, and being alive for real.
Dawn breaks like a bull through the hall
Never should have called
But my head's to the wall and I'm lonely
A few weeks ago, tranced in loneliness, I crawled into bed at 6 PM and put on Garden State. I have never seen Garden State but I am often lonely.
It was the second week of a new job, retraining my brain to swim the oceans of tasks ongoing—of strategy and Slack, of email and creative—and I had no one to tell. Not no one, but no one really. Sometimes I share the mundane with my mom or sister, but the mundane can be shameful in its stupidity, so mostly I keep it to myself. This is what I miss about having someone. Someone to tell the stupid things to. It’s nice when people pretend to care about your presentation or commute, that the cat woke your roommate and now he is angry. That particular night the loneliness was loud. Since the break-up it had not been so loud. I didn’t text anyone because I didn’t have anything specific to say. I’m overwhelmed by loneliness. I’m lonely and life is long and hard.
Ordinarily, I have such difficulty choosing a show or movie that I end up watching nothing at all. I’m trying to be less precious with art, less scholarly. Maybe I read a chapter of the psychology book or a Lorrie Moore story and it doesn’t need to be this whole journey, this grand undertaking with deadlines. The last novel I read quickly and consistently was Emma Cline’s The Guest (which I’m not going to “review,” I’ve never had the stomach for that, but I don’t disagree with Sarah Chihaya, who writes that the novel is “not a caustic takedown of the rich, but a queasily unfunny reminder of their invulnerability.” It was an equally-readable but less-satisfying My Year of Rest and Relaxation. I’m wary of taking down successful female novelists like Cline or Moshfegh because it’s a miserable thing to do when someone writes work that is objectively beautiful and sells, both of which I’d like my own fiction to be and to do. In her review, Chihaya asks, “But can a book run on the energy of what doesn’t happen, rather than what does?” and, somewhere on their own summer vacations, the entire Fiction MFA faculty at Brooklyn College is saying, as good parents do, “Told you so.”)
Anyway, there was Garden State, a tile in the mosaic of options, and I hit play before I could drown in the other options. It came out in 2004. I can’t think of why I did not watch it, except that I was in 6th grade, often waiting for the people around me to tell me what to like, and my father is an immigrant who likes E.T. or anything that references Italy, and neither of my parents had time to show me movies they liked, or even watch movies, returning home, as they did, well after 10 at night from the restaurant. How I missed Garden State is a less interesting question to me than how a suburban Catholic school girl growing up in the 90s developed taste at all—pre-all-encompassing internet and all the takes that come with it. I developed the tastes I did because there was mystery to the process of discovery. I went to the library and read all the books they’d let me. I listened to my teachers. My Uncle Bob showed me PeeWee Herman. On the weekends, Barb showed us The March of the Wooden Soldiers and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. I didn’t understand film as a rigorous vehicle for stories—I just watched the things people showed me. I liked what I liked (Harry Potter, Sailor Moon, other magic-adjacent entities) and I stayed in those tastes.
Strangely though, I did download the Garden State soundtrack—illegally, via LimeWire—and listened to it on repeat for years after the film hit theaters. Every song on that soundtrack makes me feel 12. Because of Garden State, I heard The Shins, Iron and Wine. I’d known Simon & Garfunkel, but not “The Only Living Boy in New York.” There was The Postal Service cover of “Such Great Heights,” which so epitomized cool that I plucked certain lyrics for AIM away messages, imagined selecting it to be played at my wedding. Every CD I ever burned contained that track. That fucking Colin Hay song. Fuzzy visions of love suddenly clear, possible, through the music.
So one night almost 20 years later, I watch it because there is nothing left to do or say. The bad breakup now just a scar, the pain from another man fresh, and here I am: the only living boy in New York. As I watch, I wait for each familiar song, and when they enter the scenes I am neither 12 nor 32 but someone much much older, someone not of this time. We speed through the world, advanced, moneyed, and proud that we don’t need each other, and I have never known how to exist like that. There are many profound moments in the script, perfectly early 2000s indie, but it’s the soundtrack—not the rain or the screaming in garbage bags—that captures Andrew Largeman’s loneliness. Half of the time we’re gone but we don’t know where is one of the loneliest lines out there, and yet Simon & Garfunkel don’t sound sad singing it at all. That’s their genius. They understand that loneliness isn’t heartbreak or a largely-solo existence but the state of being awake to pain, our own and that of the living and the dead. It cannot be equated with sadness because sadness fades and loneliness—if you are alive for real—does not. Once, maybe a decade ago, I got into an argument with someone about the distinction between sadness and melancholia, the latter being a state I recognized as difficult but uncontrollable. It was not something I could just turn off. I didn’t want to remove it from me, as if it were some kind of tumor. Its presence doesn’t negate joy. It makes me feel alive. It connects me to strangers. It comes with the territory of writing.
At the end of the film, Andrew does not return to LA. There’s a brief fake-out in which he tells Sam that he needs to go, needs to fix what’s broken in him because she is too important and he, being broken, will mess things up. He calls this pause an ellipses, boards his plane, and does, we think, the realistic thing. He assures her he will come back to New Jersey. He says, “I only know you three days and you changed my life,” and when he does, a tiny gear clicks in my brain and I feel awake to pain. How many times has someone changed my life in a matter of days, weeks? How many times have I reoriented, feeling, as I do, that someone who could shift my world in so short a time could have profound effects in the long run? In matters of the heart, I’m hopeless. I blame my Neapolitan roots, my summers in southern Italy heaving with passion. I blame all the books, the stories. But I’d rather have the disease of passion than one of robotic practicality. Even the words from some 2004 indie rom-com were once a person’s real feelings.
Of course, Andrew doesn’t leave for LA. He finds Sam, in all Natalie Portman’s elvish perfection, crying in a phonebooth. He says to forget the ellipses. It’s stupid. “This is it,” he says, “this is life, and I’m in love with you, and I think that’s the only thing I’ve ever been sure of in my entire life.” Objectively romantic, and yet not untrue. But it’s the next lines that stay with me, that I’ve been turning over and over in my head since I heard them:
I’m really messed up right now. I’ve got a whole lot of stuff I’ve got to work out but I don’t want to waste any more of my life without you in it. And I think I can do this, and I want to—I mean, I have to, right? So what do we do? What do we do.
What do we do. When we are met with the possibility of real love, real pain, real loneliness—what do we do? It’s the question of my life, so willing, as I am, to be swept up in the torrents of others. But only in letting the current take me do I understand that I can swim. That because I can float and I can swim, I am really alive.
Recently, I found myself swept up in a man that I will always love a little. When I was lonely watching Garden State, I was lonely in the basic ways that today’s dating scene invites—apps and endless options, non-monogamy and ghosting. I wanted to be cradled by this man, to feel the protection a physical body creates. I wanted to shoulder his pain because it hurts so badly to see someone you love who is hurting—and hurting you. True loneliness is loving a man who doesn’t love himself. I love him because he, too, is alive. But when I asked Andrew’s question—what do we do?—we had different answers, and that’s another loneliness entirely, impossible for a head like mine to comprehend, because there are so few of us left who are truly alive. When you find people who are awake to the same things, who say yes, it’s real, I feel it, too, I see it, I see you, it’s natural to want them around. Maybe even need. I listen to the songs and sift through memory. I tell my heart to tell his that I’m here. Being alive isn’t the same as feeling free. I’m overwhelmed by loneliness. I’m lonely and life is long and hard.
I miss tumblr every day 🥀
( music getting me thru )
Obviously, listen to the Garden State soundtrack and tell me you don’t also feel 2004 (how many times can you write Garden State in a single work)
“The Air That I Breathe,” The Hollies
I’m sure I heard this song before this year, but this is the year it became a guidepost. When I was sad sad lonely lonely, I was home in PA, and I played this for my mom and Barb, who were teens in the 70s. We sang it and danced in the kitchen in March, me hugging my mom and Barb holding the dog. I will never tire of it.
“July, You’re a Woman,” John Stewart
And I have not been known / As the Saint of San Joaquin / And I'd just as soon right now / Pull on over to the side of the road / And show you what I mean