The night after our first kiss, my band played covers for hours in the campus bar. It was packed, humid in the way a February night out can be, bodies piling up against each other, blooming sweat. You were there, somewhere in the back. That year, people were coming and going from the band so frequently that every concert was a crapshoot. We had too many guitarists, not enough horns. The singers read lyrics off their phones, trying not to kick the plastic cups of beer that circled our faux stage like a fairy ring.
The changes on the songs we played were easy compared with what most of us played in jazz band. F / B flat / C / F, that sort of thing. I had my tricks to impress the crowd. Start with a low note, slide up high, add a little gravel in your throat to distort the sound. The fact that we were all a little drunk helped.
Leaving, it was hard to push my bare sweaty arms into my winter coat, maneuver myself and my trombone out the door. Those were the days when we all dressed up for the shows, ties and heels and stockings with runs. I had to walk on the balls of my feet, the weight of my instrument in its case sloping my shoulders to one side as I picked through the ice on the sidewalk. The cold didn’t hit me for the first few minutes. Maybe I stood outside and waited for a friend to finish a cigarette before steeling myself to carry my trombone the half mile to my dorm room.
You’d left already, gone to walk north. I messaged you on Facebook—I didn’t have your number, not yet. Could I come over? Yes, you wrote. You were on your way home, trying to lose someone.
Starting down the long path toward your building, I saw you silhouetted far ahead, a girl walking beside you. Later, you told me she’d asked you back to her place. I watched you swipe into the dorm building. I watched her cross the empty road, illuminated by the streetlight. I waited for her to disappear back into the darkness. Then, the hall with your room at the end of it. The click of your door.
I remember leaning my trombone against the wall, kicking off my heels. I remember you there, waiting for me.
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“You’re going to quit,” says the stranger across from me as the train pulls us further and further from Chicago.
We sit in the dining car of an Amtrak headed south, across the table from an older couple who foster ferrets. It’s our third anniversary, one that celebrates a year of long distance and my first year out of college. We made a plan to take the overnight train from Chicago to Memphis, walk around there for a day, then hop the overnight train back.
New to the rules of the train, we don’t know how to behave. The server in the dining car directs us twice before we realize we’re meant to share a table with other riders, an enforced civility that feels like a lazy plot device.
The couple asks us about ourselves. You talk about teaching, the stresses of being thrust into a classroom with little training and few resources. “It’s hard,” you keep saying. My sales job doesn’t even feel interesting enough to shit on, so I dig into my arsenal of fun facts. I’m from outside Boston. I play trombone.
“You still play?” the man asks. I reply with an “ish” answer. My landlord sent me an angry email the one time I tried to practice in my apartment without holding a mute up to the bell of the instrument to muffle the noise.
Then: “You’re going to quit,” the man says, nodding sagely. “It sounds like you want to quit.” This feels like a pronouncement from the world’s least profitable fortune teller. Predicting a quiet, boring failure. Who wants to hear that? I certainly don’t. I counter. Quietly, I get angry. Later, falling asleep in the double bed unfolded from the wall of our tiny room as the train carried us through southern Illinois, you tell me not to listen to them. You tell me I can do whatever I want.
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When I first started on trombone, older people, teachers or members of my church, would keep mentioning to me the instruments they used to play. How they’d stopped, decades ago, and wished they hadn’t. “Stick with it,” they’d tell me. “Stick with it.” I did, for a long time. I never intended to stop.
I loved playing, loved the athleticism of muscling notes into existence on the strength of my lungs alone. I played in Christmas pageants, rock bands, orchestras, brass ensembles and jazz combos. I had teachers spend hours with me going over the mechanics of sliding into my pedal register, of making low notes sound chocolatey smooth, high notes pure and crystalline.
I learned so much and forgot so much. Jazz scales, minor modes, tenor and alto clefs—they’re familiar but no longer intuitive, like cousins you grew up around but lost touch with. Who are we to each other as adults? I want to ask. How do you fit into my life?
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After ten hours and a surprisingly good night’s sleep, it’s our stop: Memphis. We trudge through slush towards a diner sign, shouldering overstuffed backpacks. In a blue vinyl booth, I order grits and you take a photo of me with my grits. Neither of us know much about Memphis.
We walk down a bridge towards the state line, which falls in the river, taking turns planting one foot in Tennessee, one in Arkansas, splitting ourselves between the two states.
There’s not much music to be heard so early in the day. Too cold for many people to be out. I’d hoped for warmth despite March barely having begun, but the day stays chill and wet. Eventually we settle on chasing comfortable familiarities: coffee shops, movie theaters. We take turns ordering cars and spend a few hours at a table in a cafe, picking at a cookie and debating where to grab a cheap dinner.
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One day I went from your apartment to the practice rooms to run scales. My junior recital was in a few months. I’d been trying to be good, practicing every day, sometimes twice a day. Things were coming together, slowly, though I still cracked the high Cs. It was the endurance of the thing that scared me, playing for fifty minutes straight. I was used to stepping into the spotlight for a 32-bar solo or an easy lyrical feature, free to sit back down and let the second row swallow me after the applause.
All the practice rooms in the music building had mirrors, usually bolted on the backsides of the doors. I used to watch my body in the mirror while I played, trying not to slouch. At the end of a long session I would inspect my lips before heading back out into the music building. A red ring often puffed up where my mouthpiece had lain, like a bruise. Better players didn’t have this. But I put too much pressure on my mouth when I played, smashing my horn against it to wrestle the sound out. A weakness in embouchure.
That day, my range was awful. I tired out after twenty minutes of playing, cut my session short and headed to the library. I can’t kiss you so much before I practice, I told you, later. I don’t have the stamina.
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A friend told me the best way to do long-distance was to talk to each other every day, no matter what. To practice cultivating fondness across distance. Create the routine, create new points of connection. Once you graduate, we get good at this, talking on the phone every day, sometimes twice a day.
As a kid, I expressed my affinity for things by running straight at them. I wanted to be an actor, a musician, a detective. It took me a while to learn that loving plays didn’t make me an actor. Even longer to learn that passion and skill didn’t have to line up evenly for a pursuit to be worthwhile.
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On the train back north, we get a smaller room—bunk beds. You start grading assignments and I climb up to the second bunk, strapping myself into the vinyl harnesses designed for sleep without fear of falling.
We arrive back in Chicago early, and you soon leave for your apartment in another cold city, six hours away. A month later, we split again. A Friday night Facetime call connecting us from states apart as I choke out a stilted apology. The distance was too wide. We’d grown around each other’s absences, filled the spaces with strange lifelines that didn’t make sense to the other. That Monday, I put in my two week’s notice at work. I keep my two feet planted in Illinois. You take yours from Ohio to Washington, then New York.
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You told me you loved me right away, and I said it right back. I thought about joining you in Cleveland when I graduated, but I didn’t. You thought about quitting your teaching program and joining me in Chicago, but you didn’t.
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I get a new job scooping ice cream for long lines of teenagers and families and couples on first dates. A few people ask for the weird flavors, but most ask for familiarity. Something they’ve had before. Chocolate mint chip, cookies and cream. I still have half of a Bach cello concerto stored in the muscle memory of my right hand, the one that holds the slide. I join a choir full of kind women who start long email threads punctuated with exclamation points. I don’t practice.
A year later, I quit my ice cream job, five months into the pandemic. A few months after that, I end a year-and-a-half long relationship. I’m good at cutting things out of my life, I tell my therapist. I keep not playing. I teach myself how to sew, how to juggle, yet I keep not playing.
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I was pretty good. I allow myself this small boast, now, because it’s from a time in my life that feels over. I was good, I did compete. I don’t, now.
Every time I leave something for later I condemn it to the purgatory where my half-read books and a long-abandoned screenplay live. I leave Google docs open in my browser for weeks, knowing that if I close the tab I’ll likely never look at the idea I wrote down again. I have a hard time trusting that the important things will remain, that what falls away matters less than what stays. I know you’re not supposed to have regrets, but I have so many.
Yet it almost feels like a gift, to shed something I loved that much. To brush off a past ambition as easily as a dusting of snow.
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Last fall, I spent a month with my parents back east. We drove up to my grandparents’ house in Vermont for a few days, stayed in their cabin and stayed distanced. At dinnertime, we met outside in the apple orchard to drink and eat, saplings threading through our lines of vision.
My dad plays the trumpet, well. A few days into the visit, we started running duets in the orchard. Opera excerpts, Sousa marches, nameless etudes—we had years of material to wade through, and he’d packed my old marching band trombone. I hadn’t lost as much as I thought. I could hit the occasional high note, though my endurance was shot. But we got through the pieces, hitting the repeats and codas too. We played every day for a week. After I drove back to Chicago, I didn’t play at all.
When I was younger, I had a lot of lives stretching ahead of me. I was able to hold many of them in my line of sight for a long time. The past few years, things have started slipping away faster. People too. It’s comforting, though, to revisit a path from the other side. It’s a relief to know I’ll likely never again be as good a player as I was at 21.
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When I talked to you on the phone last month, I was sitting in the skate park a block from my old apartment, the one you toured with me three Julys ago. “You sound like you’re doing well,” you said as I watched teenagers fly back and forth across the ramps. So do you, I said, because you did.
The things I cut out have ragged edges. They don’t go cleanly. I’ve been vegetarian for fifteen years, but I still look at meat on a grill and go: well, maybe. I’m friends with my exes. Sometimes I think I’m waiting for you to walk back from New York and plant both your feet next to mine.
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A month after we break up, I fly to Austria to visit my friend teaching in Linz. The first morning there, I wake up and go out for some air. I walk a block before rounding a corner and climbing up a wooded path. I go down the hill a different way, aiming to loop around back to the apartment building, but I can’t quite get my bearings. The streets are deserted and mist clings to my jacket. I walk what I think is the same loop over and over, ending up in a different place every time. After about thirty minutes of this, I remember I didn’t write down my friend’s address and don’t know the names of her roommates.
Somehow, somehow, I find the wooded path, find the apartment, unlock the door to find her standing in the hall, shoes on. “You got really lost, huh?” my friend says, more confirmation than question. Later, we take the train into Vienna, sit in the opera cheap seats and drink beer in the street. I’m not surprised I got lost. I have a horrible sense of direction. More impressive, honestly, is that I found where I was meant to be going at all.