[Emma Healey, who has written for us in the past, is going to be our August guest. She's wonderful, so enjoy.]

Feel Alright - "Get Gone"

Hi.

So okay. I've been here before. Two years ago I wrote two different posts for this site; one was about heartbreak, and the other was about Canadian federal politics. At the time I was living in Montreal and had just had my heart broken, but serious real - like, dry ice, kitchen floor, shatter-hard. This isn't strictly speaking an important or essential detail, but sometimes it's nice to have context. Between the two posts there were 3.5 songs. One of them came from a mix CD my friend Mike made for me.

Right now I live in Toronto, but I'm writing this from New York, in a friend's apartment. The last time I came to this city was two years ago - two weeks after I'd written those posts for this site, a month or so after the breakup. The trip was one we had planned together; I was going to take the train and he was, I think, driving. The plan was to meet. In Canada the national rail line is called Via, as in conjunction and nothing else. In America it's different. On an Amtrak train you can purchase and eat a whole DiGiorno Solo Cheese Pizza For One on your lap with a knife and fork and people do not look at you and think What a sad young woman or wonder if the pizza tastes at all like the sinkhole that's opened up and is widening steady for four weeks and counting between and against you, your ribs, at least not for that reason alone. It's just what they serve in the Café Car. On Via they have cold pasta salad and you don't even stand up to get it. People think Canada and America are pretty much the same place but the border between them is both clear and guarded for a reason.

One of the songs on the mix CD Mike gave me two years ago, two days before I got on the train, was one that he'd already sent to me a couple of weeks beforehand, post-breakup but pre-posts, when I'd been panicking about what to write. "You'll like this, I think. It'll work," he said, which it did. I listened to the song, I wrote the thing, everything turned out fine, in this life it's important to have friends who know better than you. The rest of the songs I'd never heard before. "It's music to be sad on a train to," is what he said when he handed it over. Via used to have these display/signage panels hung up behind the Information desks in a lot of their larger stations; the one in Montreal was positioned so that if you glanced to one side, while waiting in line, you'd end up staring for minutes on end. They were these huge maps of the whole country, cut out of wood or thick board, colour-gradient in from the outside like in a high school textbook. For each train station in the country there was a small hole drilled into the map, in the right place and scaled to size, and then the whole thing was backlit so that all the points glowed. There were lines drawn between the stations to show you the trains you could take to get between them. For months, two years ago, after that trip, I had this dream where I pulled each city off the map and swallowed every route like its own string of Christmas lights until I glowed from inside with all the ways a person could possibly choose to stop. They've since replaced all the maps with plasma-screen TVs, which display advertisements and are probably for the better. In most cases, there are two ways a person can do things: swallow cities or don't. Move into or away. Get the pizza or run. I listened to the same CD all the way through on my trip here again, the same as I did last time. You can travel from one city into the next to escape the same thing you had planned and bought tickets to meet there a month ago, you can sit on the train in the future and stare at the ghost of yourself in the same songs you didn't know then, you can live in this city or that one, whatever. There's a through line between things but it's not always clear if it's route or a fault or the point at which things get divided. This song isn't one of the ones that got me here, but it could be. It's important sometimes to refer to conjunction as just what it is. I am flying back home in the morning.

[this is a new song, but Buy hahahahahahaha from Bandcamp]