I know Gary’s secret. I’ve seen the playlists on the covers of his mixtapes, and I’ve been in the car alone with him when he let the radio knob ease from Z100 to 106.7 Lite FM. I’ve watched him as he waited for the light, resting his head back and closing his eyes to the pastel sound of Peter Cetera. And I felt it, too—that longing.
This is private music, the kind you’re supposed to groan about when flipping through stations. You’re supposed to press the scan button as fast as you can to obliterate it from the air, and replace it with something younger, harder, more guarded, less earnest. There is nothing cool about a heartbroken man singing in falsetto or a woman harmonizing with him. It’s a weakness. I have it and so does Gary.
“Next Time I Fall,” “Don’t Know Much,” “Somewhere Out There” (the theme from An American Tail), “All Out of Love.” “One More Night.”
It’s a mistake to call these love songs. They are the musical architecture of tears, the slow-dripping sounds of losing someone. They are not about love, but about the agony of separation embedded in the code of love. They are about me and my mother.
I discovered this when I was in third grade, racked with compulsive thoughts of her death. Whenever she would leave me, even to go to the grocery store, I would score my emotional state with one of those songs, not because it made me feel better or braver, but because those songs, as overwrought as they were, expressed exactly how it felt when we were apart.
The doctor called what I had separation anxiety. I call it mourning. It wasn’t the fear of losing my mother, it was the awareness that I had already lost a part of her—the part of her arm that balanced me, the part of her lap that fit my body like an armchair. “That hurts,” she began to say when I’d crawl onto her seat in the car. “You’re getting too big.” That was supposed to be a good thing, I understood that. But I also understood that with each new moment, two new versions of us shed two older versions. The more time passed, the further the distance between us and them, between the two of us now. I couldn’t crawl into the front seat with her anymore. That part of life was over, and every day we moved further away from it, until one or both of us would eventually disappear.
So I began the grieving process in advance, to prepare for what the pain might consist of, the sickness it carried with it. It felt like melting—all the fluids in my body were draining out of me—and it sounded like Linda Ronstadt and Aaron Neville, like Peter Cetera and Cher, like Phil Collins and REO Speedwagon, like Lite FM.
Even now, while we are inside Gary’s car, the opening keys of the synthesizer on “One More Night” bring me back to when I was most agonized, and in a way, most in touch with my own existence, with hers. My mother. My first love. The first person I couldn’t afford to lose. As the song drifts between our headrests, I wonder if Gary is thinking of his mother, too.