Crying in Motion
Note
This piece was written in late April — before protests against police brutality revitalized the streets of New York City — and scheduled to run in June, three years after “Melodrama” was released. I considered whether it was worth updating the piece to reflect the way that these protests have changed the energy in the city, but this piece was not written to romanticize the civil unrest that’s happening. For information and actionable resources, please visit Camp Thirlby’s guides and the Actions for Solidarity: #BlackTransLivesMatter document.
Art ℅ Annika Bjerke
Every time I see a stranger crying on the subway I go through the same thought process: I contemplate saying something supportive and immediately recoil; I check my bag for tissues, or try to find other small gestures of kindness that wouldn’t make me look like a serial killer; I consider what I wanted the last time I cried on the subway, and remember that it was probably the simple mercy of public invisibility; I continue to mind my business.
Public tears are the lifeblood of New York City. They summon the routine heat waves and flash floods. They lubricate the rat-riddled subway tracks. They add a certain opacity to the toxic water in the Gowanus Canal.
You can try to fight me on this, but I believe there’s no better place to listen to music than one of the old orange and yellow-seated subway cars. Lorde wrote “Melodrama” during a sticky New York summer, where she spent her time listening to Paul Simon, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell and Fleetwood Mac on the subway. The result was a sweaty, fluorescent blur; a portrait of teenage heartbreak in motion.
The first time I listened to “Melodrama” in its entirety, I felt a certain hollowness nestle behind my lungs. I left my parents’ apartment and walked mindlessly — as I had done every day for most of my life — to the northwest entrance of the Union Square subway station.
When I began making friends who lived farther and farther away from me, I discovered the beauty of riding the train aimlessly. As a tween, I fell in love with watching the sun set behind the Brooklyn Bridge as my Q train left Manhattan, and found comfort in the small snippets of poetry in motion that got stuck in my head. As a teen, I wandered drunk through the urine-soaked hallways of New York City’s underground, screaming along with my music, convinced that no one would bother me if I seemed more unhinged than they did.
But on the eve of June 16, 2017, after I grabbed a straw-ber-rita from the deli and hopped on the subway, I put my phone on airplane mode and began crying. I cried because sometimes, the smell of trash rotting in the summer heat is beautiful. I cried because someone had finally given me permission to scream that I was 19 and I was on fire! I cried because I knew that no one would try to watch or stop me.
I’m not 19 anymore, but the world is still on fire. In the last few months, I’ve watched many of the people I love flee to suburban havens and rural homes. I watched as loved ones have died and the subway has shut down and the streets have grown empty, waiting for a resurgence of life.
It’s been easier than ever to cry in public. I did it often during quarantine, because for the first time in my life, I found myself caught between feeling defensive for my city and trapped within it. I may never be able to explain how it felt when the world froze, but a few weeks ago I would’ve said that freezing and deteriorating feel the same in an empty city.
The subways are still empty, and I usually only travel as far as my feet can take me. Some days that’s 14 miles. Other days it’s a few hundred steps.
When the world spins out of control, it’s hard to find words that adequately capture what we’ve lost. Each day has begun to feel like a nesting doll of luck and devastation. I cry at beautiful smells and sounds like I may never experience them again; I laugh at the things that are too sad to fully grasp.
I like to think that all of my friends actually believed it when they told me New York City was now their home, too. But it didn’t really matter; when everyone leaves, you lose the desire to figure out if things will ever return to normal. They didn’t, and they don’t need to.
But I believe this cycle of love and loss is why we often cut our emotions short. It’s why Lorde wrote one of the most perfect breakup albums of all time and gave it a self-taunting name like “Melodrama.” It’s why we cover our fears with jokes and our sadness with silence.
That’s where so many of our emotions sit; in a space that feels too flippant for us to create space for, yet too raw for us to ignore. It’s easy to remember that we’re still alive, even if life as we knew it has died. But it’s not easy for some — even as death has bubbled to the surface — to grapple with the fact that plenty of Black, trans, differently abled, and otherwise marginalized people have always been dying.
They’ve told us, even as we weren’t listening. It’s not news just because everyone has to think about their mortality now as constantly as they did.
When it comes down to it, every ending carves out a new space, and sometimes that space is so big that we’re left feeling like a mere shell of a person. One day, we'll look back at this and feel a sense of relief that it happened. Of course it’ll end. It has to end.
As I sit indoors and scroll through my old videos and notes and memories, I think about how easy it is to condense life into a blur of supercuts. The way we can douse our memories in loud music and bright colors. The way we learn to miss the mundane — the dingy lighting of an office bathroom; the warmth of a rush hour train; the salty sweetness of crying in public — when the rug has been pulled out from under us.
Last October, as I rode the subway to work, I sat in front of a row of strangers and cried.
“I think sadness hits you like a brick to the heart,” I rambled into my notes app, “but happiness kinda sneaks up on you and settles on your shoulders and I just wanted to take a breath to acknowledge that I’m carrying it with me.”
Nobody knows what happiness will look like after the dust has settled, but there will be small acts of joy that emerge as the world adapts. We’ll still get to ride the subway home late at night and sing our music out loud, as if that might stop a strange man from approaching us on the street. We’ll watch our drunk friends fall onto the warm, grimy pavement yet again, and we’ll laugh so hard that we can’t tell if we’re crying, or peeing a little bit, or both.
I haven’t been moving enough; I haven’t been laughing enough; I haven’t been calling the people I love enough. But tomorrow I still hope to wake up again; to set myself in motion; to scream at the top of my lungs; to cry; to move with the crowds of protesters that are flooding the streets and bridges; because the next time I rumble across the Manhattan Bridge at sunset, I’ll feel grateful that we never lost our momentum.
About the Author
Julia Carmel (she/her) works in the newsroom at The New York Times. You can usually find her reading in public parks, eating Takis, and dancing at free concerts. You can check out her other work on her website.
