I Love You And You And You

I love all of you so damn much. I don’t even know where to begin.

I suppose I’ll start with you.

I love you for so many reasons, but one of them is how you adeptly select the perfect song for my heart at any given moment, like a sniper sending a torrent of love through a stained-glass window of a church two counties away.

We often hang out under a four in the morning pretext when we stumble into a home with our circle of friends. You’ll commandeer the helm of the of the nearest Spotify-supported device like you’re goddamn Jean-Luc Picard. And after grazing your black hair out of your face a couple times and settling town with a cheap tall boy, you’ll prowl around for songs that sound perfect when paired with the mental visual of shit exploding in slow motion – buildings, fruit, anything capable of producing satisfying fulmination. It’s a specific mental image that seems a bit peculiar, but four in the morning is a vulnerable time, and the catharsis of any object destructing is a perfect to fathom when you’re seeking to bask in a cloak of nostalgia.

So you’ll play Dungen. You’ll play Brian Eno’s most transcendental material. You’ll play the Delfonics. You’ll play John Cale. You’ll play some Swedish artists; the ones you picked up from the years you studied at Lund that never saw American radio play because they refused to learn English.

I seldom get to interject with my own tunes, but I almost never mind this – you’re a fucking Rhodes scholar of melody. If I could pick anybody to speak poetically about music, it would definitely be you. Your words about music aren’t far-reaching or pedantic; they are earnest and informative and mutate the way I think about song. I love you.

Now, you.

I love you for so many reasons, but one of them is that you’re a brilliantly filthy degenerate who is always up hanging out without an explicit goal or mission in mind. I can always count on you and the accent you borrowed from Bill Clinton for some hardcore drifting. Usually we spend the best parts of our summer strolling across Brooklyn three zip codes at a time while drinking at least that many coffees before drinking twice as many beers whenever we decide to bring our incessant chatter to a bar.

In a city of self-centered neuroticism and high-rise egos where everybody is looking to say the word “no” to as many people as possible in order to erect their mental towers higher and higher, you’re the dude who says yes to pretty much anything. Yes to field trips to Long Island to go to the closest Red Lobster because cheddar-bay biscuits. Yes to helping me picking out a vintage leather jacket because you’ve got an eye for that sort of thing. Yes to 3PM day-drinking during any day of the week. Just yes.

And where most dudes in New York love sports and perpetuating chauvinism by shit-talking women, you are kind and purposeful and you want to learn about humanity and help the people close to you, despite your sandpaper exterior. I love you.

How could I forget about you?

I love you for so many reasons, but when it comes down to it, you’re the little sister I would’ve selected for myself if I had that kind of power. Now, I know you’re already thinking about how trite and cliched this sounds, like the sort of thing that’d be hanging up in needlepoint on a wall over a toilet in a sorority house next to some Sex in the City quotes. LYLAS, LOL, I get it. But let me explain.

I actually have a sister of my own; she’s the same age as you. We’ve never been close, and I was always perplexed by our mutual hostility. Maybe it’s worth attempting to repair it as an adult. But that’s beside the point – having a person in my home who was looking to pick a fight with me at every angle wasn’t like growing up with a human being, it was like growing up with a ghost. As sad as that sounds, it doesn’t upset me – I’ve never actually known what a healthy relationship with a sibling could feel like.

But when I would hypothesize about what a positive relationship with a sibling would look like, I’d imagine a scenario in which we joked with each other and would annoy the piss out of each other, but ultimately culminated everything with a hug. Growing up, I wanted someone to be protective of, which ended up manifesting itself with my closest friends instead of something familial.

And so, this is what I’ve got with you. We laugh like stooges and run around loaded up on jet fuel that we’ve created for ourselves out of gin and tonic and giggles. Sometimes I wish I had actual muscles to beat up all the weird Libra dudes who break your heart. When we hang out, we drown each other in the diminutive details of our lives until we wear each other down with either brutal honesty or through semi-intentionally getting on each other’s nerves. And that’s okay, because I know that after we retire to our respective corners for a second, we’ll be texting each other about weird farts at seven in the morning in no time. I love you.

I love all of you so damn much. So I’m working on telling you all, one at a time.