Sad Songs And Other Time Portals

Three months after my best friend died, I sent a message to the musician Emma-Lee Moss. I don’t usually write fan mail to living artists, but whenever a beloved musician dies and I see the tributes streaming in I wonder, why did we wait? That was partly on my mind when I wrote to Moss, who performs under the name Emmy the Great. But mostly, I was trying to solve a mystery.

I've had a number of fixations since my friend died. I tried to complete all my unfinished crossword puzzles, as he had a few years ago, but a glitch in the app has me stuck at 99.1%. Every day for weeks I wore the t-shirts he tie-dyed. I listened to his playlists, which were full of songs that meant nothing to me but allowed me to feel closer to him. Talking Heads, Steely Dan, Blondie, Thievery Corporation. I got my first tattoo, of Bigfoot, because he loved Bigfoot. Whenever I needed to tell him something I sent an email to myself with his name in the subject line. I wrote things like, “I cut off a piece of my finger when trying to cook the bucatini. I think it’s fine,” and “Remember when we went to Borders and you bought a Jamiroquai CD, and I thought you were so cool and weird?” and “I’m afraid if I’m in the same room as your ashes I might try to eat them.”

Now my mind has moved on to tracking down a missing song. My friend probably wouldn't have liked it; he had no patience for melancholy music. He liked a funky bass line and a persistent beat. Daft Punk and Gorillaz and Kraftwerk.

In my message to Emma-Lee Moss, I told her I was a fan of her music, especially her song 'Gabriel,' which I heard for the first time in 2008. At some point after that, the song seemed to vanish. There are a few bootleg versions floating around on YouTube, and I own two copies of the vinyl pressing. But the song isn’t streaming anywhere, and the iTunes file I bought in 2008 no longer plays on any of my devices. I wrote to Moss to ask: what happened to the song? Where did it go?

When I first heard 'Gabriel,' that evening in Topshop in 2008, it was winter. I was wearing a dark green woolen jacket with brass-colored buttons. I was an American living and working in London. I was twenty-three years old. I was lonelier than I had ever been in my life. And I was in love with two people at the same time.

One of them was my boyfriend, who lived in San Francisco, the city I had most recently left. The other, my best friend, lived at Luke Air Force base in Maricopa County, Arizona. My friend and I had tried the romantic thing a few times. It never quite worked. In hindsight, we were always supposed to be friends. At the time, though, we had a vague agreement: while he was in the Air Force, we’d date other people, and when he was done, and I was home from London, we’d give it a real shot. This plan was becoming complicated. I’d thought the distance would make it easy to end things with my boyfriend, but somehow it was bringing us closer together.

That evening, at Topshop, I felt like I was betraying both my boyfriend and my friend. I felt like I had to make a definitive choice, and I couldn’t. Over the tinny Topshop speakers I heard urgent, melancholy strumming and then the singer's clear, sweet voice and I stood very still, as if that would help me to hear better.

When Is This Music? reviewed 'Gabriel,' they wrote, "It’s all just a little too nice, right down to the guitars that twinkle along in the background like a scattering of stardust. It takes a few listens to register that you might even actually quite like it." Not for me. I heard those chords for the first time and felt them in my body like electricity. The review calls 'Gabriel' "a little twee," and says the lyrics aren't as sharp as they could be. But if the “twinkly guitars” made me buy the single, the lyrics kept me listening.

The speaker in the song addresses Gabriel directly. There is something about him that she has to leave behind in order to move forward with her life, and she urges him to do the same. The speaker tells Gabriel to remember her the way he knew her best; she says she’s kept everything he ever sent her.

She can keep the letters, but she can't keep Gabriel.

A few months after I messaged Emma-Lee Moss, I went through the letters my friend sent me when he was in the Air Force. I keep them tucked inside a padded manila envelope. Inside I found a piece of paper with little hand-drawn cartoons, and a designated area to place a magnet to hang it on my fridge. A four-page missive about failing to find artisan bread on base in Arizona. A neon-orange rubber banner that read REMOVE BEFORE FLIGHT. On the outside of the padded envelope he’d written our names, using the nicknames we had for each other: Danny and Talie. He used my maiden name, too.

I kept looking at the envelope and thinking: none of these people exist anymore. The thought filled me with an expansive loneliness that is now familiar to me. At the same time it was a comfort. I realized Danny and Talie were safe, untouched by time, stuck forever in 2003 and 2005 and 2007.

Before my friend died, I didn’t know that grief was a time portal. In 2008, 'Gabriel' gave me permission to release the romantic feelings I had for my friend, and to commit to my boyfriend, who is now my husband. But death flattens time. It undoes progress. It compresses years into a black hole of loss. I now feel every feeling I ever felt for my friend, all at once, and sometimes the gravity of it threatens to swallow me whole. Other times it’s the only thing that provides any relief.

Time isn’t linear, I tell myself while I am gasping for air because I miss him so much. I miss him driving my Honda Civic up to wine country for the weekend. I’m in the passenger seat playing Daddy Yankee, and I’m turning up the volume and he’s inching it back down, and I’m turning it back up and finally he’s saying fuck it and cranking the knob as high as it goes, rolling down the windows, letting Dame mas gasolina blast through downtown Sonoma. I don’t mean I’m comforted by the memory. What comforts me is the idea that all of these moments are happening perpetually, at the same time, even if I can’t go back to them. This isn’t the same thing as a memory. It isn’t the same thing at all.

I didn’t hear back from Emma-Lee Moss. The answer wouldn’t bring me any resolution, anyway. It would have something to do with a label dispute and legalese. I searched for clues about where the song went, but found nothing. There’s a line in Gabriel, where the speaker says she wants to fold Gabriel up like a ribbon and keep him in her pocket. I liked to listen to this song on my iPod while walking around London and when she sang that lyric, I’d reach into my own coat pocket, feeling for a ribbon that wasn’t there. In a way, my friend and I achieved that: our friendship shrank down to pocket size. It was transportable and ever-present and safe. We shared writing and memes and podcasts and books. Once I heard his aunt refer to me as his best friend, and I thought, if she says it, it must be true.

But if we were best friends, why didn’t I know how much he was struggling?

“I hate that you don't exist anymore,” I wrote to him one afternoon. Sandstorm was blasting from my laptop speakers. “But then again. Music doesn't technically exist either.”

I still don’t know what happened to 'Gabriel.' I am trying to accept that I can listen to it on vinyl, and that has to be enough. Sometimes I pull up the review Sasha Frere-Jones wrote for the New Yorker, back in August of 2008, when Emmy the Great played the Bowery. Frere-Jones liked the show so much he left with an Emmy the Great tote bag, featuring a cat with the words "I can haz Emmy?" The meme reference makes me ache for 2008. The review includes a link to the iTunes single for 'Gabriel,' and when I click it now I just get an error message: The page you're looking for can't be found. This, too, makes me ache.

The page you're looking for can't be found.