Love Songs for Circumnavigation
originally published in Issue 5 of Wizards in Space
The line for the Dark Ages Technology Club concert is already moving when I get there, and I shuffle forward with my arms crossed, trying to look like I’m totally cool being here alone. I’m sandwiched between two pairs of starry-eyed couples, and I am a night sky under cloud cover, dim and lonely, no light to be found.
Ordinarily, I love going to concerts alone. But from the moment on our third date that Bel told me he had tickets to this show too, I’d envisioned us going together. He should be in line with me. We should be holding hands and peering at the window displays of the Goodwill next door and choosing occasions for the mannequins’ outfits. Instead, Bel is probably already inside. I know that, like me, he’d rather die than miss this show.
I stand on the toes of my platform boots and scan the line snaking out behind me. I don’t see him, but when I turn to check out the heads in front of me, I see his mess of dark hair, his boxy shoulders, the glint of his big glasses when he sweeps his gaze behind him. I duck my head.
Bel and I aren’t speaking right now, and it’s my fault. I didn’t intend to let myself get so close to him. I thought we’d be friends, go to concerts together sometimes, maybe hang out to listen to a new album every now and then. I didn’t intend to develop a crush on him, or kiss him, or date him, or fall in love with him. But that’s exactly what I’ve let myself do, and it isn’t fair to him.
Because the thing about Bel is that I think he loves me back. His interest only seems to bloom bigger and brighter, and it thrills me, but it makes me wary, too, a prey animal losing her camouflage with every step we take closer to sex. Every time we watch a movie on his couch, I feel myself dreading the possibility that he’ll slide his hand toward my chest or my thighs, try to take it further. I want to be close, I want him to hold me, but I’ve dated enough to know that that kind of closeness comes with expectations of its own.
I don’t want to break things off with Bel. But I don’t see another way that this can end.
The first time I sat on Bel’s couch, months ago now, he pulled his guitar up into his lap and I braced for the worst, because I’d seen this before. I’d heard enough mediocre covers of “Stairway to Heaven” to write an extremely specific trauma memoir. I closed my eyes and waited for those telltale mangled opening notes, but they didn’t come.
“Can you harmonize?” Bel asked, and I opened my eyes, cautious.
“If I know the song.”
Bel said, “Do you know this song?” and my whole world shifted with the next four chords.
I’d discovered Dark Ages Technology Club when I was fourteen, purely by accident. Their track “Here’s Your Chance” had been free on iTunes that week, so I downloaded it and queued it up. I don’t even remember what I was listening to beforehand. I just remember that as soon as the opening notes to “Here’s Your Chance” thundered on, it lit up a piece of my heart I hadn’t even known existed.
It sounded like music written to drive out the darkness of the world. A ribbon of violin above a raw surge of cello, banjo notes rippling against the current of drums and guitars, the twining pull of nine-part harmonies cresting above it all. And it was fast, rollicking and radiant, unabashed in its emotion.
I downloaded the entire album immediately. I listened hungrily, wary that there might be a song somewhere in the track listing that disrupted whatever realm I had entered, but it didn’t come. When the album looped back around, I was sitting wide-eyed, knees to my chest, breathing as though I’d been caught in its hurricane.
And there was Bel, plucking out the same cords that had stopped my heart when I was fourteen. There was Bel, lighting up a different piece of my heart.
“Yeah, I know it,” I said, the words catching like kindling as I said them. “They’ve been my favorite band since I was in high school.”
He put down the guitar. “Mine too,” he said, and his smile wrung the remaining air from me.
Now, I hand my license to the bouncer, and I walk through the poster-plastered hallway feeling small. I try to square up: Alma against the world, the way I’ve trained myself to be. I did what I had to do, I tell myself. It would be unfair to ask him for anything else.
The venue is stuffed with people already, the first few rows forming in front of the stage. I think about getting a drink before joining their ranks, because standing and holding a drink makes you look a little more like you intended to be here alone, but the opener is going on soon, and I hate trying to dance with a drink in my hand.
Bel and I have gone to three other shows together: Frangipanic, Shara Kinnear, and the Sacre Blues. I’ve seen bands with other dates before, and sometimes they don’t get that everyone has their own established way of being at concerts. I don’t want to stand in someone’s arms and sway if people are dancing; I get the romantic inclination to hold your person close, but I hate being forced into moving a way I don’t want to move.
We saw Shara Kinnear on our fourth date, and Bel could have tried to get cozy. We’d already spent an evening on the couch in his apartment inching closer until we were in each other’s arms, and it would have made sense for him to try to hold me during a slow song like “Tuesdays at Your Place.” But instead, he offered me his hand and let me choose whether or not I wanted to take it, and he understood when I said no.
He knows that I’ll want to dance tonight. He knows how much Dark Ages Technology Club means to me, and I know how much it means to him. I know he’ll want to listen with his eyes closed and do that funny swaying thing he does where he only moves his shoulders.
It’s the tenth anniversary of The Sound of Daybreak on the Ocean’s release, and Dark Ages is doing a thirteen-city tour in its honor. They’re playing through the whole album, and I’m determined to enjoy it. I’ve been waiting nine years to see this band live, and I’m not going to let myself ruin it by wondering if I did the right thing by pushing Bel away. This was mine long before I met him, and it will be mine long after he’s gone, and I am going to have a good time if it kills me.
A tiny part of me wonders: If I did the right thing, why does it feel so shitty?
Sometimes, if I think about it from the right angle, or the wrong one, it seems like such a stupid thing to be hung up about. I don’t want to have sex with him: simple. It isn’t personal; I don’t want to have sex with anyone. I’ve done it enough for the people who’ve asked. I’ve let them ask and ask until they’ve worn me down to a yes, and I won’t do it anymore.
I’ve had good sex and bad sex, and my conclusion is that quality doesn’t make a difference. It isn’t fun, I don’t like it, and it’s rock-bottom on the list of things I could do to show someone I like them. Instead, I could make them a playlist to chronicle every moment of knowing them that was even slightly significant, bake them every bread The Great British Bake-Off has ever shown me, learn to arrange flowers so I could write them a romance novel via bouquet. We could lie on my twin mattress together, listen to the single most romantic album ever recorded, and read each other’s palms with fortunes we’ve made up. We could stay out all night, see late movies and eat French toast at three in the morning, and only run out of things to talk about when we fall asleep in each other’s arms at dawn.
For the past couple of weeks, that’s what I was planning to do tonight, choreographing it like a music video in my head. Bel and I would go for late-night breakfast after the show, and we’d stay out until sunrise, and we’d find ourselves at the ocean just as the day was breaking, and I’d tell Bel that I loved him for the first time.
And then the other day, Bel asked if I wanted to spend the night.
“Just to sleep,” he said, but I’d heard that before. I panicked and said no, and then, because I could see the end washing in like the tide, I canceled every upcoming plan we had for this week, and we haven’t spoken since.
That first day on his couch, he sang “Here’s Your Chance,” his voice hoarse but sure, and I sang below him, soft and conscious, trying to string together a harmony that would impress him. “Here’s Your Chance” is the first song off The Sound of Daybreak on the Ocean, the most romantic album ever recorded. It’s a concept album, and it weaves together thirteen sets of lovers, across space and gender and time. At the beginning, they lose each other, and they keep finding each other in different lives as the album progresses, only to be torn apart again and again.
I’d sworn off dating entirely when I met Bel. It felt like being asexual and wanting a romantic relationship that accepted that was too unfair, too selfish, too much to ask of anyone, and I was tired of compromising myself just to have someone next to me.
And then six months ago, Belmont Vuong sat down at the table next to mine at a coffee shop. I was working on an annotated playlist for my best-friend-slash-roommate Molly’s birthday, and he was applying to jobs to get out of waiting tables. He complimented the Sacre Blues sticker on my laptop, and when I asked if he was going to their upcoming show, he said yes, and he asked if I wanted to get coffee and talk about music sometime.
I considered it. He’d been polite to the barista when he ordered, and he had a pan pride sticker on his water bottle, and he’d mumbled a very sweet oop, excuse me, when he bumped into a little kid trying to make it back to his seat.
Cautiously, I said yes, I did want to talk about music. And when we met up a week later, we talked about music for four hours, and he didn’t make a move or try to touch me, and when I told him I was going to the Frangipanic show in a couple weeks, he didn’t say Let’s go together. He said, Maybe I’ll see you there, and the room to keep my distance made me feel like I could trust him.
Molly said I should have told him I was ace right away, just rip off the Band-Aid. That way, she said, I would know right off the bat if he was worth my time.
MOLLY, I text her now, in the dull buzz of the venue’s filler music. Bel is here and I don’t know what to do.
You need to talk to him, she replies, and my lungs go airless. You can’t go on like this forever. Just tell him. If he hasn’t thought it’s weird you haven’t banged after three months, he’s going to be fine.
It just feels unfair, I type, and then I delete it, type it again. It just feels unfair to ask that of him.
Molly sends the emoji with eyes and no mouth, which is what she uses to tell me that she isn’t going to say what she’s thinking, but boy is she thinking it. What feels unfair?
To ask him to be in a relationship without sex.
*To ask him to be in a relationship that respects your sexuality, Molly corrects, and it’s like putting on glasses with a new prescription for the first time and being able to see the difference between airplanes and the stars. If you keep telling yourself it’s unfair to ask for that, you keep telling yourself that there’s something wrong with you that doesn’t deserve respect.
Do I believe there’s something wrong with me?
The opener takes the stage and launches into a fast song. I jump and stomp and move like I always do, but the smile on my face feels fake, and when I catch it, it makes my chest want to split in two. It’s a smile I recognize. That smile has sat, ashamed and apologetic, through Does that make you a virgin? and I bet I could fix you.
There is nothing wrong with me, I think as I rage. I don’t believe that.
In the final song on the album, the lovers reprise “Here’s Your Chance,” and nothing bad happens to tear them apart. Instead, one of them gives the other the chance to stay and build a life, or to let go and move on. Your voice drowns in the sound of daybreak on the ocean, goes the last line, the sea in your arms and the skyline in mine / and the sun will keep rising, the tides still in motion —
And it ends. The lyric unfinished, the chord unresolved, the last high piano note ringing into silence. There were huge, heated online forums dedicated to decoding the meaning of the ending back when I was in high school. I was one of the most involved participants, but I refuse to tell anyone which username was mine, least of all Bel, who badgers me about it every chance he gets.
I’m a big believer in a happy ending. I like to think the album is about the sun and moon, seeing themselves reflected in people on Earth and deciding to keep seeing each other each morning and evening, dependable and permanent but never quite together. The sun will keep rising, the tides still in motion. Even though the arrangement isn’t ideal, or conventional, they trust each other, day after day, to choose each other again.
The opener’s set is short, six or seven songs that are fast and loud and satisfying. I dance, but my heart and mind are boiling over, trying to push the agony out in catharsis. But as the adrenaline ebbs from my body in the lull that follows, people moving and buzzing around me, everyone with someone, I don’t feel any better.
I don’t think I did the right thing. I think maybe deep down, in some tiny chasm of my heart, I do believe there’s something wrong with me.
I think that tiny part of me is wrong.
I think bands find you when you need them. When I first discovered Dark Ages, all of my friends had begun dating, and all any of them wanted to talk about was sex. They had preferences, and fantasies, and experience. I had crushes on almost everyone I met but absolutely no desire to do anything more than hold hands with them, and no one else seemed to get that. It was starting to feel like I was missing something, a memo or an email or some important piece of genetic code.
In the reprise of “Here’s Your Chance,” the lovers sing about how in each life, their only constant is the reassurance that the other person is under the same sky. The lyrics are celestial with yearning, blooming with want, shot through with sorrow, incandescent with joy. What struck me most of all — what still strikes me now — is that all of the wanting in the lyrics is emotional. Bodies don’t matter when you’re chasing the same soul through centuries. The simplicity of wanting to be with someone, to know that you’re sharing a timeline, a skyline, a moment — it transcends physical desire, and years before I realized I was asexual, that spoke to something in me.
The thing about wanting is that I don’t feel like I’m allowed to want it. Wanting in the movies, on the radio, is so sexual. There never seems to be space for it not to be. But I wanted to stay. I wanted to wake up next to him, watch him blink the sleep from his eyes and kiss the sheet marks on his cheeks. I wanted to offer to make breakfast, laugh with him under the sheets about the weird dreams he always has after shows. I wanted the simplest common denominator of just being alive beside each other.
But that’s never all it is. Everyone assumes that if you want to be that close to someone, you want to fuck them, too. I’ve never spent a night with someone else without getting that nudge, those kisses on my neck that won’t just stop, for god’s sake, leave me alone, I want to sleep. They go to wash up, and I lie there in the tangle of sheets, trying to convince myself I wanted it because I said yes.
I take a lap between sets and scour the venue uselessly for Bel, but I still can’t find him. Another cloud rolls over the night sky of my heart. I fight my way back toward the front of the crowd and try to put him out of my mind. There’s nothing wrong with me.
In the shock of silence when the filler music drops off, I can almost believe it.
The sea of people around me screams as Dark Ages takes the stage. There’s a pull in my chest so tight that I could cry. I’ve been waiting for the last nine years to hear this album live, and I always kind of hoped it would be with someone I loved. I didn’t want it to be like this, trapped in the uncomfortable limbo between together and not.
Those first four chords, and I’m lost. “Here’s Your Chance” is a hopeful, daring song, and I turned it sad with every note I sang beneath Bel on his couch that day. On our one-month anniversary, we made bánh kẹp lá dứa in my kitchen and danced to this album, and when it finished, Bel paused it on the cusp of turnover.
“You always do the harmony,” he said, dabbing flour off my forehead. “Let me take it this time.”
It felt like ages since I’d sung the melody. “Here’s Your Chance” was one of my most tried-and-true shower jams and dishwashing songs, but since hearing Bel play those first four chords, I’d become obsessed with fine-tuning my harmony, finding the perfect notes to underscore his. I’d forgotten how much the melody leapt and soared, and I spun through the kitchen with Bel behind me, his low voice punching up to major chords where my harmony had slipped into minors, and it had never sounded so triumphant, so reckless.
I’ll regret it for the rest of my life if I don’t sing along now.
Slowly, I start to move.
There are nine people in Dark Ages, and you can’t really imagine how much noise nine people can make until you’ve let it totally consume you, until your heart is beating through the drumhead and the string harmonies are threading through your veins, and halfway through I understand that I’m crying, maybe for myself and maybe for Bel, and I don’t know what else to do but find my minor notes and add my aching heart to the harmony line.
I dance and I dance. I think furiously that I will remember this, the stroke of joy in my heart when I heard that chord change, or this, the way that cymbal crash shot through my heart, or this, the exhale when I threw my hands up at the chorus. I will not remember how much it hurt. I will not remember crying.
Someone at my back jostles against me, and their phone crashes down near my boots. I grab it off the floor and turn to give it back to them, and it’s as I’m gesturing under the music, no problem, no worries, that I find him.
Bel is standing in the half-light of the bar, one elbow resting on the hardwood, and the sight of him hits me like the slow locomotive of a cello note. I miss him in a raw, living way like the drumbeat in my heart and the strings pulling blood through my veins, a missing I can feel in the floor, in my chest, that I’ll feel in my ears tomorrow. It feels untenable that we are in the same room and not together, that we’re not dancing side by side like we did in my kitchen, and it is even worse — it is so much worse — that it’s all my fault.
Three drumbeats announce the start of “Love Songs for Circumnavigation”: the tenth song on the album, and Bel’s favorite. I stamp along, frustration and want knotted up in my chest. When I dance now, it’s desperate, throwing myself forward and back, thrashing my hair back and forth until I can’t see through it. My lungs are tight and pinched, and it’s so hard to sing even though I’ve known the words for almost half my life.
My lonely orbit opens up for you / the joy of leaping marrs the fear you’ll shatter when you land / but if you’re willing, I am waiting / I choose you every time the stars demand I lose you once again
It hits me crisp and sharp, a brittle guitar string bright against silence. I want Bel in my orbit. I want those mornings, those evenings, those afternoons on his couch, in my kitchen. I want him next to me at shows, and I want his voice in harmony with mine. I want him so much that it makes me dizzy in a wild, cosmic way, and to pretend that I don’t — to tamp it down or hold it back because it doesn’t feel fair to him — that isn’t fair to me.
Maybe what I want isn’t conventional. Maybe it isn’t ideal. But it isn’t too much to ask, either. It is not too much to want.
I turn and fight my way back out of the crowd.
Bel is turning from the bar when I burst from the crush of people, a crumpled wad of cash left on his check that I know came from his own bartending tips.
“Bel!” I shout, and of course he doesn’t hear me, so I lunge forward and touch his shoulder, fling myself into freefall.
His whole face softens when he sees me, and his mouth twists, and he almost misses when he reaches back to the bar to set down his cider. A single star burns through the darkness in my chest, one shard of light closer to daybreak.
He’s wearing ripped-up black jeans and a denim button-down over the black Frangipanic t-shirt I bought him for his birthday, and he looks good, soft and rumpled, but his cloud of dark hair is flat on one side, and behind his big round glasses, his eyes are wilted, burnt out. Not so good.
“I have to explain,” I shout over the music, and he leaves his drink on the bar when I take his hand.
There is nowhere quiet, which is also the title of the sixth song off The Sound of Daybreak on the Ocean, but there is a corner of the venue near the door that is slightly less loud. My hands and feet feel like they might dissolve any moment, but I make myself push through. I have to tell him. Maybe he pushes me away. Maybe he doesn’t. But I have to try before I call this. I can’t leave it at that unresolved chord. I have to know how it ends.
Bel leans against the black-painted paneling. “Alma,” he says above the sound, and everything in me lights at the sound of his voice around my name. “Please don’t break up with me here.”
“I don’t want to break up with you!” The fear sets in fast like poison, and I need to get this out before it takes me. “I want you. I want to go to sleep with you and wake up with you and I want everything in between. I want you more than anything.”
“Then why —?” he asks, and I close my eyes. I brace.
“I have to tell you something,” I yell, hugging my arms to my chest. “But it’s not negotiable.”
“Alma,” he says again, a moment of antidote to hold off the hurt. “What is it?”
His eyes are sad, gentle. His hands are in his pockets. He is prepared to let me go. I love him like a bow drawn across a cello, low and subterranean, and I have to let him know.
“I’m asexual,” I say. There is no way to say it but to shout, and in that smash of a second, I understand catharsis. “I don’t want to have sex with you, or with anyone.” I feel my shoulders pull in, bracing for impact. “But I love you. I want to be with you. I should have told you sooner, but — you spooked me when you asked me to stay. I’m sorry.”
Behind us, the penultimate song of the album begins: “Blue Highway Night, 4:25 AM.” If the finale is the crash, this song is the wave before, slow and soft, building. I catch my breath. I leapt. I fell. I’m still standing. Still whole.
Bel says, “Can I touch you?”
I realize: Bel has always asked. He has always obliged when I’ve said no.
“Yes,” I say, and he mashes me close to him.
“I don’t care if we never have sex,” he says into my hair. He does not shout. “I want to listen to your playlists for every occasion and I want you to teach me to make that bread you always make. If we only ever hold hands again, I want to hold hands with you. Do you hear me? I don’t care. I love you. It has nothing to do with whether you want to have sex with me or not.”
I don’t know if the heart I feel beating is Bel’s or my own. I don’t know, at this exact moment, if there’s a difference.
“You know why I wanted you to stay last week?” he asks. He holds me so tight, but there’s no terror. No entrapment. I shake my head.
He smoothes a strand of hair out of my face. “If you were cool with it, I was going to ask you to stay again tonight,” he says. “And tomorrow morning, I was going to wake you up early and take you down to the piers for breakfast, and we were going to —”
“To watch the daybreak on the ocean,” I say, overlapping, and I begin crying again. I don’t have to look at him to know that he’s weepy, too. The strains of “Blue Highway Night” wind around us, a violin like an outstretched hand, a harmony like a fist clutched to the heart.
“I was going to keep you out tonight,” I say, half-laughing. “Take you to a midnight movie, go for late-night breakfast, then go to the ocean for daybreak.”
He closes his eyes in understanding, and I touch my forehead to his.
“We still can,” he says, only for me. “Whatever you want.”
“I want to stay,” I say. Starlight blooms in my chest, its constellations bridging us together. “If the offer is still good.”
He nods. Not far from us, the opening chords of “Here’s Your Chance (Reprise)” ring out, thundering, triumphant.
Bel looks at me. I take his hand, and we fight together to the front of the room.
© 2019 Hannah Lamarre
Ordinarily, I love going to concerts alone. But from the moment on our third date that Bel told me he had tickets to this show too, I’d envisioned us going together. He should be in line with me. We should be holding hands and peering at the window displays of the Goodwill next door and choosing occasions for the mannequins’ outfits. Instead, Bel is probably already inside. I know that, like me, he’d rather die than miss this show.
I stand on the toes of my platform boots and scan the line snaking out behind me. I don’t see him, but when I turn to check out the heads in front of me, I see his mess of dark hair, his boxy shoulders, the glint of his big glasses when he sweeps his gaze behind him. I duck my head.
Bel and I aren’t speaking right now, and it’s my fault. I didn’t intend to let myself get so close to him. I thought we’d be friends, go to concerts together sometimes, maybe hang out to listen to a new album every now and then. I didn’t intend to develop a crush on him, or kiss him, or date him, or fall in love with him. But that’s exactly what I’ve let myself do, and it isn’t fair to him.
Because the thing about Bel is that I think he loves me back. His interest only seems to bloom bigger and brighter, and it thrills me, but it makes me wary, too, a prey animal losing her camouflage with every step we take closer to sex. Every time we watch a movie on his couch, I feel myself dreading the possibility that he’ll slide his hand toward my chest or my thighs, try to take it further. I want to be close, I want him to hold me, but I’ve dated enough to know that that kind of closeness comes with expectations of its own.
I don’t want to break things off with Bel. But I don’t see another way that this can end.
The first time I sat on Bel’s couch, months ago now, he pulled his guitar up into his lap and I braced for the worst, because I’d seen this before. I’d heard enough mediocre covers of “Stairway to Heaven” to write an extremely specific trauma memoir. I closed my eyes and waited for those telltale mangled opening notes, but they didn’t come.
“Can you harmonize?” Bel asked, and I opened my eyes, cautious.
“If I know the song.”
Bel said, “Do you know this song?” and my whole world shifted with the next four chords.
I’d discovered Dark Ages Technology Club when I was fourteen, purely by accident. Their track “Here’s Your Chance” had been free on iTunes that week, so I downloaded it and queued it up. I don’t even remember what I was listening to beforehand. I just remember that as soon as the opening notes to “Here’s Your Chance” thundered on, it lit up a piece of my heart I hadn’t even known existed.
It sounded like music written to drive out the darkness of the world. A ribbon of violin above a raw surge of cello, banjo notes rippling against the current of drums and guitars, the twining pull of nine-part harmonies cresting above it all. And it was fast, rollicking and radiant, unabashed in its emotion.
I downloaded the entire album immediately. I listened hungrily, wary that there might be a song somewhere in the track listing that disrupted whatever realm I had entered, but it didn’t come. When the album looped back around, I was sitting wide-eyed, knees to my chest, breathing as though I’d been caught in its hurricane.
And there was Bel, plucking out the same cords that had stopped my heart when I was fourteen. There was Bel, lighting up a different piece of my heart.
“Yeah, I know it,” I said, the words catching like kindling as I said them. “They’ve been my favorite band since I was in high school.”
He put down the guitar. “Mine too,” he said, and his smile wrung the remaining air from me.
Now, I hand my license to the bouncer, and I walk through the poster-plastered hallway feeling small. I try to square up: Alma against the world, the way I’ve trained myself to be. I did what I had to do, I tell myself. It would be unfair to ask him for anything else.
The venue is stuffed with people already, the first few rows forming in front of the stage. I think about getting a drink before joining their ranks, because standing and holding a drink makes you look a little more like you intended to be here alone, but the opener is going on soon, and I hate trying to dance with a drink in my hand.
Bel and I have gone to three other shows together: Frangipanic, Shara Kinnear, and the Sacre Blues. I’ve seen bands with other dates before, and sometimes they don’t get that everyone has their own established way of being at concerts. I don’t want to stand in someone’s arms and sway if people are dancing; I get the romantic inclination to hold your person close, but I hate being forced into moving a way I don’t want to move.
We saw Shara Kinnear on our fourth date, and Bel could have tried to get cozy. We’d already spent an evening on the couch in his apartment inching closer until we were in each other’s arms, and it would have made sense for him to try to hold me during a slow song like “Tuesdays at Your Place.” But instead, he offered me his hand and let me choose whether or not I wanted to take it, and he understood when I said no.
He knows that I’ll want to dance tonight. He knows how much Dark Ages Technology Club means to me, and I know how much it means to him. I know he’ll want to listen with his eyes closed and do that funny swaying thing he does where he only moves his shoulders.
It’s the tenth anniversary of The Sound of Daybreak on the Ocean’s release, and Dark Ages is doing a thirteen-city tour in its honor. They’re playing through the whole album, and I’m determined to enjoy it. I’ve been waiting nine years to see this band live, and I’m not going to let myself ruin it by wondering if I did the right thing by pushing Bel away. This was mine long before I met him, and it will be mine long after he’s gone, and I am going to have a good time if it kills me.
A tiny part of me wonders: If I did the right thing, why does it feel so shitty?
Sometimes, if I think about it from the right angle, or the wrong one, it seems like such a stupid thing to be hung up about. I don’t want to have sex with him: simple. It isn’t personal; I don’t want to have sex with anyone. I’ve done it enough for the people who’ve asked. I’ve let them ask and ask until they’ve worn me down to a yes, and I won’t do it anymore.
I’ve had good sex and bad sex, and my conclusion is that quality doesn’t make a difference. It isn’t fun, I don’t like it, and it’s rock-bottom on the list of things I could do to show someone I like them. Instead, I could make them a playlist to chronicle every moment of knowing them that was even slightly significant, bake them every bread The Great British Bake-Off has ever shown me, learn to arrange flowers so I could write them a romance novel via bouquet. We could lie on my twin mattress together, listen to the single most romantic album ever recorded, and read each other’s palms with fortunes we’ve made up. We could stay out all night, see late movies and eat French toast at three in the morning, and only run out of things to talk about when we fall asleep in each other’s arms at dawn.
For the past couple of weeks, that’s what I was planning to do tonight, choreographing it like a music video in my head. Bel and I would go for late-night breakfast after the show, and we’d stay out until sunrise, and we’d find ourselves at the ocean just as the day was breaking, and I’d tell Bel that I loved him for the first time.
And then the other day, Bel asked if I wanted to spend the night.
“Just to sleep,” he said, but I’d heard that before. I panicked and said no, and then, because I could see the end washing in like the tide, I canceled every upcoming plan we had for this week, and we haven’t spoken since.
That first day on his couch, he sang “Here’s Your Chance,” his voice hoarse but sure, and I sang below him, soft and conscious, trying to string together a harmony that would impress him. “Here’s Your Chance” is the first song off The Sound of Daybreak on the Ocean, the most romantic album ever recorded. It’s a concept album, and it weaves together thirteen sets of lovers, across space and gender and time. At the beginning, they lose each other, and they keep finding each other in different lives as the album progresses, only to be torn apart again and again.
I’d sworn off dating entirely when I met Bel. It felt like being asexual and wanting a romantic relationship that accepted that was too unfair, too selfish, too much to ask of anyone, and I was tired of compromising myself just to have someone next to me.
And then six months ago, Belmont Vuong sat down at the table next to mine at a coffee shop. I was working on an annotated playlist for my best-friend-slash-roommate Molly’s birthday, and he was applying to jobs to get out of waiting tables. He complimented the Sacre Blues sticker on my laptop, and when I asked if he was going to their upcoming show, he said yes, and he asked if I wanted to get coffee and talk about music sometime.
I considered it. He’d been polite to the barista when he ordered, and he had a pan pride sticker on his water bottle, and he’d mumbled a very sweet oop, excuse me, when he bumped into a little kid trying to make it back to his seat.
Cautiously, I said yes, I did want to talk about music. And when we met up a week later, we talked about music for four hours, and he didn’t make a move or try to touch me, and when I told him I was going to the Frangipanic show in a couple weeks, he didn’t say Let’s go together. He said, Maybe I’ll see you there, and the room to keep my distance made me feel like I could trust him.
Molly said I should have told him I was ace right away, just rip off the Band-Aid. That way, she said, I would know right off the bat if he was worth my time.
MOLLY, I text her now, in the dull buzz of the venue’s filler music. Bel is here and I don’t know what to do.
You need to talk to him, she replies, and my lungs go airless. You can’t go on like this forever. Just tell him. If he hasn’t thought it’s weird you haven’t banged after three months, he’s going to be fine.
It just feels unfair, I type, and then I delete it, type it again. It just feels unfair to ask that of him.
Molly sends the emoji with eyes and no mouth, which is what she uses to tell me that she isn’t going to say what she’s thinking, but boy is she thinking it. What feels unfair?
To ask him to be in a relationship without sex.
*To ask him to be in a relationship that respects your sexuality, Molly corrects, and it’s like putting on glasses with a new prescription for the first time and being able to see the difference between airplanes and the stars. If you keep telling yourself it’s unfair to ask for that, you keep telling yourself that there’s something wrong with you that doesn’t deserve respect.
Do I believe there’s something wrong with me?
The opener takes the stage and launches into a fast song. I jump and stomp and move like I always do, but the smile on my face feels fake, and when I catch it, it makes my chest want to split in two. It’s a smile I recognize. That smile has sat, ashamed and apologetic, through Does that make you a virgin? and I bet I could fix you.
There is nothing wrong with me, I think as I rage. I don’t believe that.
In the final song on the album, the lovers reprise “Here’s Your Chance,” and nothing bad happens to tear them apart. Instead, one of them gives the other the chance to stay and build a life, or to let go and move on. Your voice drowns in the sound of daybreak on the ocean, goes the last line, the sea in your arms and the skyline in mine / and the sun will keep rising, the tides still in motion —
And it ends. The lyric unfinished, the chord unresolved, the last high piano note ringing into silence. There were huge, heated online forums dedicated to decoding the meaning of the ending back when I was in high school. I was one of the most involved participants, but I refuse to tell anyone which username was mine, least of all Bel, who badgers me about it every chance he gets.
I’m a big believer in a happy ending. I like to think the album is about the sun and moon, seeing themselves reflected in people on Earth and deciding to keep seeing each other each morning and evening, dependable and permanent but never quite together. The sun will keep rising, the tides still in motion. Even though the arrangement isn’t ideal, or conventional, they trust each other, day after day, to choose each other again.
The opener’s set is short, six or seven songs that are fast and loud and satisfying. I dance, but my heart and mind are boiling over, trying to push the agony out in catharsis. But as the adrenaline ebbs from my body in the lull that follows, people moving and buzzing around me, everyone with someone, I don’t feel any better.
I don’t think I did the right thing. I think maybe deep down, in some tiny chasm of my heart, I do believe there’s something wrong with me.
I think that tiny part of me is wrong.
I think bands find you when you need them. When I first discovered Dark Ages, all of my friends had begun dating, and all any of them wanted to talk about was sex. They had preferences, and fantasies, and experience. I had crushes on almost everyone I met but absolutely no desire to do anything more than hold hands with them, and no one else seemed to get that. It was starting to feel like I was missing something, a memo or an email or some important piece of genetic code.
In the reprise of “Here’s Your Chance,” the lovers sing about how in each life, their only constant is the reassurance that the other person is under the same sky. The lyrics are celestial with yearning, blooming with want, shot through with sorrow, incandescent with joy. What struck me most of all — what still strikes me now — is that all of the wanting in the lyrics is emotional. Bodies don’t matter when you’re chasing the same soul through centuries. The simplicity of wanting to be with someone, to know that you’re sharing a timeline, a skyline, a moment — it transcends physical desire, and years before I realized I was asexual, that spoke to something in me.
The thing about wanting is that I don’t feel like I’m allowed to want it. Wanting in the movies, on the radio, is so sexual. There never seems to be space for it not to be. But I wanted to stay. I wanted to wake up next to him, watch him blink the sleep from his eyes and kiss the sheet marks on his cheeks. I wanted to offer to make breakfast, laugh with him under the sheets about the weird dreams he always has after shows. I wanted the simplest common denominator of just being alive beside each other.
But that’s never all it is. Everyone assumes that if you want to be that close to someone, you want to fuck them, too. I’ve never spent a night with someone else without getting that nudge, those kisses on my neck that won’t just stop, for god’s sake, leave me alone, I want to sleep. They go to wash up, and I lie there in the tangle of sheets, trying to convince myself I wanted it because I said yes.
I take a lap between sets and scour the venue uselessly for Bel, but I still can’t find him. Another cloud rolls over the night sky of my heart. I fight my way back toward the front of the crowd and try to put him out of my mind. There’s nothing wrong with me.
In the shock of silence when the filler music drops off, I can almost believe it.
The sea of people around me screams as Dark Ages takes the stage. There’s a pull in my chest so tight that I could cry. I’ve been waiting for the last nine years to hear this album live, and I always kind of hoped it would be with someone I loved. I didn’t want it to be like this, trapped in the uncomfortable limbo between together and not.
Those first four chords, and I’m lost. “Here’s Your Chance” is a hopeful, daring song, and I turned it sad with every note I sang beneath Bel on his couch that day. On our one-month anniversary, we made bánh kẹp lá dứa in my kitchen and danced to this album, and when it finished, Bel paused it on the cusp of turnover.
“You always do the harmony,” he said, dabbing flour off my forehead. “Let me take it this time.”
It felt like ages since I’d sung the melody. “Here’s Your Chance” was one of my most tried-and-true shower jams and dishwashing songs, but since hearing Bel play those first four chords, I’d become obsessed with fine-tuning my harmony, finding the perfect notes to underscore his. I’d forgotten how much the melody leapt and soared, and I spun through the kitchen with Bel behind me, his low voice punching up to major chords where my harmony had slipped into minors, and it had never sounded so triumphant, so reckless.
I’ll regret it for the rest of my life if I don’t sing along now.
Slowly, I start to move.
There are nine people in Dark Ages, and you can’t really imagine how much noise nine people can make until you’ve let it totally consume you, until your heart is beating through the drumhead and the string harmonies are threading through your veins, and halfway through I understand that I’m crying, maybe for myself and maybe for Bel, and I don’t know what else to do but find my minor notes and add my aching heart to the harmony line.
I dance and I dance. I think furiously that I will remember this, the stroke of joy in my heart when I heard that chord change, or this, the way that cymbal crash shot through my heart, or this, the exhale when I threw my hands up at the chorus. I will not remember how much it hurt. I will not remember crying.
Someone at my back jostles against me, and their phone crashes down near my boots. I grab it off the floor and turn to give it back to them, and it’s as I’m gesturing under the music, no problem, no worries, that I find him.
Bel is standing in the half-light of the bar, one elbow resting on the hardwood, and the sight of him hits me like the slow locomotive of a cello note. I miss him in a raw, living way like the drumbeat in my heart and the strings pulling blood through my veins, a missing I can feel in the floor, in my chest, that I’ll feel in my ears tomorrow. It feels untenable that we are in the same room and not together, that we’re not dancing side by side like we did in my kitchen, and it is even worse — it is so much worse — that it’s all my fault.
Three drumbeats announce the start of “Love Songs for Circumnavigation”: the tenth song on the album, and Bel’s favorite. I stamp along, frustration and want knotted up in my chest. When I dance now, it’s desperate, throwing myself forward and back, thrashing my hair back and forth until I can’t see through it. My lungs are tight and pinched, and it’s so hard to sing even though I’ve known the words for almost half my life.
My lonely orbit opens up for you / the joy of leaping marrs the fear you’ll shatter when you land / but if you’re willing, I am waiting / I choose you every time the stars demand I lose you once again
It hits me crisp and sharp, a brittle guitar string bright against silence. I want Bel in my orbit. I want those mornings, those evenings, those afternoons on his couch, in my kitchen. I want him next to me at shows, and I want his voice in harmony with mine. I want him so much that it makes me dizzy in a wild, cosmic way, and to pretend that I don’t — to tamp it down or hold it back because it doesn’t feel fair to him — that isn’t fair to me.
Maybe what I want isn’t conventional. Maybe it isn’t ideal. But it isn’t too much to ask, either. It is not too much to want.
I turn and fight my way back out of the crowd.
Bel is turning from the bar when I burst from the crush of people, a crumpled wad of cash left on his check that I know came from his own bartending tips.
“Bel!” I shout, and of course he doesn’t hear me, so I lunge forward and touch his shoulder, fling myself into freefall.
His whole face softens when he sees me, and his mouth twists, and he almost misses when he reaches back to the bar to set down his cider. A single star burns through the darkness in my chest, one shard of light closer to daybreak.
He’s wearing ripped-up black jeans and a denim button-down over the black Frangipanic t-shirt I bought him for his birthday, and he looks good, soft and rumpled, but his cloud of dark hair is flat on one side, and behind his big round glasses, his eyes are wilted, burnt out. Not so good.
“I have to explain,” I shout over the music, and he leaves his drink on the bar when I take his hand.
There is nowhere quiet, which is also the title of the sixth song off The Sound of Daybreak on the Ocean, but there is a corner of the venue near the door that is slightly less loud. My hands and feet feel like they might dissolve any moment, but I make myself push through. I have to tell him. Maybe he pushes me away. Maybe he doesn’t. But I have to try before I call this. I can’t leave it at that unresolved chord. I have to know how it ends.
Bel leans against the black-painted paneling. “Alma,” he says above the sound, and everything in me lights at the sound of his voice around my name. “Please don’t break up with me here.”
“I don’t want to break up with you!” The fear sets in fast like poison, and I need to get this out before it takes me. “I want you. I want to go to sleep with you and wake up with you and I want everything in between. I want you more than anything.”
“Then why —?” he asks, and I close my eyes. I brace.
“I have to tell you something,” I yell, hugging my arms to my chest. “But it’s not negotiable.”
“Alma,” he says again, a moment of antidote to hold off the hurt. “What is it?”
His eyes are sad, gentle. His hands are in his pockets. He is prepared to let me go. I love him like a bow drawn across a cello, low and subterranean, and I have to let him know.
“I’m asexual,” I say. There is no way to say it but to shout, and in that smash of a second, I understand catharsis. “I don’t want to have sex with you, or with anyone.” I feel my shoulders pull in, bracing for impact. “But I love you. I want to be with you. I should have told you sooner, but — you spooked me when you asked me to stay. I’m sorry.”
Behind us, the penultimate song of the album begins: “Blue Highway Night, 4:25 AM.” If the finale is the crash, this song is the wave before, slow and soft, building. I catch my breath. I leapt. I fell. I’m still standing. Still whole.
Bel says, “Can I touch you?”
I realize: Bel has always asked. He has always obliged when I’ve said no.
“Yes,” I say, and he mashes me close to him.
“I don’t care if we never have sex,” he says into my hair. He does not shout. “I want to listen to your playlists for every occasion and I want you to teach me to make that bread you always make. If we only ever hold hands again, I want to hold hands with you. Do you hear me? I don’t care. I love you. It has nothing to do with whether you want to have sex with me or not.”
I don’t know if the heart I feel beating is Bel’s or my own. I don’t know, at this exact moment, if there’s a difference.
“You know why I wanted you to stay last week?” he asks. He holds me so tight, but there’s no terror. No entrapment. I shake my head.
He smoothes a strand of hair out of my face. “If you were cool with it, I was going to ask you to stay again tonight,” he says. “And tomorrow morning, I was going to wake you up early and take you down to the piers for breakfast, and we were going to —”
“To watch the daybreak on the ocean,” I say, overlapping, and I begin crying again. I don’t have to look at him to know that he’s weepy, too. The strains of “Blue Highway Night” wind around us, a violin like an outstretched hand, a harmony like a fist clutched to the heart.
“I was going to keep you out tonight,” I say, half-laughing. “Take you to a midnight movie, go for late-night breakfast, then go to the ocean for daybreak.”
He closes his eyes in understanding, and I touch my forehead to his.
“We still can,” he says, only for me. “Whatever you want.”
“I want to stay,” I say. Starlight blooms in my chest, its constellations bridging us together. “If the offer is still good.”
He nods. Not far from us, the opening chords of “Here’s Your Chance (Reprise)” ring out, thundering, triumphant.
Bel looks at me. I take his hand, and we fight together to the front of the room.
© 2019 Hannah Lamarre