Philadelphia, Again

Who makes you feel like you don’t matter? Who tells you that you don’t belong?

Therein lay the flaw, and the flaw of life itself. Life is a long failure of understanding, Mrs. Palmer thought, a long, mistaken shutting of the heart. - Patricia Highsmith

If only life were a record and everything that happens to you a song upon it. Maybe then you’d understand the things that happen to you. Maybe then you’d be happy.

Because music is the only thing that always makes sense to you and life rarely does. Or you can always make sense of music and life not at all. It’s just that music is always meaningful—or you can always find meaning in music, which isn’t quite the same; and life is not always meaningful, at least not in the ways you wish it were, which—regrettably, horribly—is exactly the same.

Maybe you should be like that bitch Joan Didion, icily intoning that it is only sentimentality that creates a narrative connecting the dots of our days, you fucking idiot. Or that other bitch Joy Williams, nihilistic and cheerful because anything that happens is just something that happens, so why cry about any of it? Why care at all? Sounds like a ‘you’ problem.

But you do care. And the more you care, the smaller you become and the less you are understood, as if the size of your heart were inversely proportional to the size of the shadow it casts. But that’s your fault. It’s only that you insist on finding meaning in everything and maybe there isn’t meaning in anything, or there is meaning in everything, and it’s just that you don’t mean anything, or you don’t mean what you think you mean which is something when actually it’s nothing, and that is why you are always sad. 

But say life was a record and everything that happens to you a song upon it, then this song would be called “Philadelphia, Again.”

You like Philadelphia. You’ve always liked it. You like the red brick buildings with their painted shutters, the flowers in window boxes and around the stairs, the painted front doors with their big brass door knockers, always shut, always quiet. You like the mean-eyed Philadelphians and their kind-eyed dogs whom they adore, scoop up in their arms, and cuddle right on the street. You like the little signs marking one place or another as once having been a place of importance; a tavern or a print shop or the home of a woman who wrote letters, and that’s why anyone knows anything at all because a woman who lived here wrote letters 300 years ago. Not that it makes a difference to her now.

You like Philadelphia because not every street has a crossing signal, so you have to trust yourself to know when to stay and when to go; you know how to do that, right? Trust yourself? Yes. No. Sometimes. You like the yoga studio with stars painted around the entrance and a chalkboard in the lobby that has “Be the light you wish to see in the world GO EAGLES” written on it in pink cursive. You like Philadelphia because it’s not Los Angeles, which cares about the wrong things, or New York, which doesn’t care about anything. Whatever Philadelphia cares about, it doesn’t care to tell you about. Philadelphia is silent, unsympathetic, beyond opinion.

Most of all, you like Philadelphia because nobody you know goes there, so nobody has an opinion about it to share with you. And doesn’t everyone have a fucking opinion! Another opinion that is really only one opinion, which is that you don’t know what you’re doing or should be doing, what you think or should be thinking, what you are, or what you deserve. Like the well-meaning friend who kindly suggested that you could write something great if only you didn’t write about music. As if music is what you write about in the first place. As if every word isn’t filled with intention, emotion, memory. As if you’re ever writing about anything but your feelings! But your feelings only matter inasmuch as they can be leveraged because since you’re here and by the way, would you listen to my song, maybe you could write about or send it to someone, tell me what you think, do you think you could do something for me.

Sometimes it seems that all of your friends and all of your enemies are exactly the same: just a gaggle of grasping hands scuttling about asking, asking, asking; taking, taking, taking; going, going, gone. You blink at their messages, put down the phone. Suspicion overwhelms you, and you start hating everyone. What do you really want? What do you want? What do you want? Nothing. Nothing. Nothing at all.

But your mind is quiet in Philadelphia. Philadelphia belongs only to you.

It’s another bad day in Brooklyn. You wake up in a horrible mood and don’t want to get out of bed, lie on your back for hours with little tears streaming down the sides of your face because you don’t matter. Who has made you feel this way? It matters even less than you do. Everyone wants me to do something for them, you think miserably, selfishly. But nobody ever wants to do anything for me. Everyone has to tell me how they feel, but nobody ever asks how I feel.

The idea that you might consider asking for what you need only upsets you more. Why should you have to ask for what should be freely given? Why should you have to make a spectacle of your emotions to inspire any consideration of them? You’ve never had anything but contempt for people who wear their sadness like a costume, walk around with their outstretched hands full of tears, begging anyone to take a drink. It’s all pointless anyway. You’re too old to think of depression as anything other than extremely boring: a crooked game played out of habit for no reward.

Then you get a message from an acquaintance, a music person you met somewhere along the line. You’ve written about his band before, seen them play a few times. He’s throwing an event in Philadelphia in the fall and wants you to come, maybe write an article about it. “Or if not, that is perfectly fine,” he writes. “Just come down and hang out.” You blink at the message. What do you really want? Nothing. Just come and hang out. You’ve always liked Philadelphia. Your spirits lift slightly, your mind whirring with the beginnings of a great idea.

I should go to Philadelphia. I’ll go tomorrow! I’ll go to Philadelphia tomorrow and I won’t tell anyone and I will do whatever I want and feel however I feel and nobody will have anything to say about it because Philadelphia belongs to me.

You book a train ticket for the next afternoon, take your time picking out clothes for the weekend: a blue striped sundress, a pink blouse embroidered with daisies. Happy clothes for a great idea. It’s perversely comforting, a kind of secret revenge, because why should anyone know where you are or where you go or why you go; the heartless undeserving who want to matter to you without ever once considering that you should matter to them. You don’t flatter yourself to think anyone actually cares, but by making plans that are solely your own—the solo lunches, the afternoon naps, the walks to nowhere in your blue striped sundress—you can be happy.

On the train, you let your acquaintance know you’re coming, just a last-minute thing, you know, if you want to meet up and talk about an article. He says we’re playing a house show tonight and would you like to come. Immediately you are excited. A house show, a house show, a house show in West Philadelphia! How fortunate you swallowed your self-absorption long enough to reach out because now you have something to do tonight, and it is exactly the sort of thing you like doing best, the kind of show you’ll always want to attend. You’re constantly getting invited out to shows in New York by publicists and labels, and you never go because they’re stupid: the expensive bars, the sycophantic crowds, the bands that aren’t even really bands, just piles of money singing songs about nothing; everything you love about music corrupted into meaninglessness by the worst people in the world. The prospect of even breathing the same air as them makes you apoplectic, and you delete the emails before you respond with something hateful.

Yes, you write back to your acquaintance. I would love to come.

You’ve never been to West Philly before, but you’ve been in a dozen punk houses just like this one, and they’re all the same: the porches with shabby couches on them and ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts, the labyrinth of upstairs rooms with shut doors housing an unknown number of roommates, the steep staircases with banisters wound with Christmas lights, a proper name instead of an address. Some attendees say they had to double check because there was another show house down the street once, and they almost went to that one because it looks just like this one because all punk houses are the same.

The basement is so hot the kids take their shirts off and press beer cans to their faces. The bands have to stop and tune their instruments between songs. Between sets, you drink beers on the front porch and listen to conversations going on around you. A girl shows off her stick-and-poke tattoo of a train and says that she loves trains because growing up in Delaware, she rarely saw one. You adore these people: punks who don’t care about anything except music and talk about nothing else; kids with ratty haircuts who ride their bicycles to the show balancing six-packs on the handlebars, carry their helmets around with them all night, gaze warily at the sky as lightening streaks overhead and make plans to hide out from the rain in a local bar when the show is over. You needn’t search for meaning here. You don’t even need to talk to feel understood. Music angels from heaven, you think. The most wonderful people I’ll ever meet.

The following day is meltingly hot. While wandering around the historic district in the early afternoon, you’re seduced by a sign offering ice cold water and the cool shade offered by the green canopies of myriad huge trees inside, and pony up $5 for entry to Christ Church Burial Ground, which boasts that it holds four signers of the Declaration of Independence and 1,400 others besides. Isn’t that nice? It’s packed with those slim 18th and 19th headstones leaning precariously against each other, sinking into the ground. Their once decorative tops are disintegrating, so they resemble ice cream dripping onto cones, the names and dates on the faces long since washed away and forgotten for even longer still. The ground is filled with tourists and also wasps, big black ones with golden wings. You try to avoid both.

All these East Coast graveyards are exactly the same in their claims of hosting the notable dead, but when you reach the gravesite, there is instead a sign saying that actually nobody knows where the body really is, but here is a stone we’ve paid for to say it’s somewhere around here, we know it’s somewhere around here. You recall another graveyard that claimed to hold an original signer of the Declaration of Independence, this one in Delaware, but it was the same bait and switch, and you got bug-bitten ankles from tromping around in the swampy grass looking for nothing. Ah, but here is someone worth remembering: “John Taylor, who departed this life in 1803 at the age of 85 years, fifty of which he was Grave-digger of this yard.” The most indispensable corpse in the graveyard, the only one who knows where the bodies actually are.

That evening you decide to walk across the Ben Franklin Bridge. You’ve seen joggers and cyclists on it in the mornings from your window and think it might be a nice walk at sunset, a good picture. But halfway across your knees lock and your vision blurs, the saliva goes soft in your mouth. Although the pedestrian walkway is wide and solid with tall rails on both sides, you suddenly feel as if it might drop out from under your feet at any moment. Paths that seem safe are never more treacherous than at the very moment you’ve decided to trust them.

You grip the railing and feel the light blue steel tube shiver with the rumble of the train and cars below. The wind whips around, lifting your pink blouse with the embroidered daisies above your head, and you can hardly bear to peel your fingers off to pull it down. You try and steady yourself by training your gaze on the Pennsylvania sky, which you’ve always loved—the low and wide Pennsylvania sky with its clouds bigger than God and twice as fast, so big and so close it’s like you need only reach out your arms to be scooped into heaven where you will be forever adored; more beautiful even than the sky over Paris, the most beautiful sky in the whole world. Panic rises nonetheless. You hadn’t known you were afraid of heights.

But it’s not the height that has filled you with terror. It’s that your mind has suddenly become preoccupied with an afternoon some years ago spent in the Mothman Museum in Point Pleasant, West Virginia. You were not interested in the Mothman stuff: the rubber costumes and leftover movie props and faceless mannequins dressed in black suits. Instead, you spent your time in the small corner of the museum dedicated to the Silver Bridge, which once connected Point Pleasant to Gallipolis, Ohio, until 10 days before Christmas in 1967, just around 5 pm, it folded like a deck of cards under rush hour traffic, causing the deaths of 46 people; two bodies were never recovered at all. It’s one of the greatest engineering tragedies in the history of the country, but you’d never heard of it until that day.

You were the only person in that part of the museum, flipping through yellowing newspaper clippings and official reports stored in those old photo books made of black paper, primary sources protected only by flimsy sheets of plastic. It’s been said that Mothman first appeared on the night the bridge collapsed, the tenuous and more-than-likely fictional connection that made it appropriate for these haphazardly organized piles of material to be stored here. But the more you read about the Silver Bridge, the more it seemed that Mothman was merely its symptom, the unbearable manifesting as the unexplainable serving as the memorial.

Because who would remember them otherwise, those people who died with their cars full of Christmas gifts; who would care aside from the locals graying in their homes or engineering students fidgeting in a lecture hall as their professor explains how a microscopic crack in one of the eyebars, there since its casting, was to blame for the disaster; that the design of the bridge was such that it would have been impossible to find the flaw even if regular inspections were standard in the country, which they weren’t until after the collapse. They would’ve had to take apart the entire bridge to find it. They would’ve had to know to look for it in the first place. So doom had always been there. It was just a matter of time and salt and corrosion for the crack to widen, for the stress to become unbearable, for the entire structure to fail.

You read so many terrible things that day. How the deck of the bridge flipped over, dumping the cars into the Ohio and collapsing on top of them, crushing the people beneath; how darkness fell so quickly on that December evening that when floodlights and car headlights were lit over the wreckage, the twisted remnants of steel and cars made it difficult if not impossible to see what was solid and what was just shadow; the police officer who recalled hearing people in the water screaming for help and being unable to see them, unable to do anything; the mother whose son’s body had yet to be found telling a reporter that “we’re awfully worried about him,” as if anguish recontextualized as mere worry could in any world mean that her child was shivering but safe on the banks, not broken and alone at the bottom of the river. Worst of all was the report from the Department of Transportation on paper thin as a whisper with a list of every vehicle on the bridge, their license plate numbers, their drivers and passengers. Arrows were drawn pointing to their locations on the bridge when it collapsed, the place they winked out of existence forever, the final time their names meant anything at all. Now what do they mean? Mothman.

Unable to stomach the rest of the walk, you turn around and go back to your Airbnb.

The next morning you are up at 5 am and decide to have another wander around before you need to get the train back to New York. It’s Sunday, and the streets are practically empty aside from security guards eyeing you suspiciously, a few scattered dog walkers, and early bird joggers along the riverfront. It’s like a different world. Here is Independence Hall without a horde of tourists posing in front of the statue of George Washington, pink dawn light shading the white cupola; yet another statue of Washington standing atop the Tomb of the Unknown Revolutionary War Soldier—a body without a name rather than the other way around for once—hokey and dirty with something about freedom inscribed above his head, one of those eternal gas flames at his feet; the 18th and 19th-century buildings butting up against brutalist government offices, every one with a flag hanging from a window. You stop to read the little plaques on all the houses you pass, learning about painters and statesmen and physicians, all the great men who called this city home and the great ideas they had here—oh, and Dolley Madison, who threw great parties!

You like Philadelphia because it tells a story about itself the way you tell a story about yourself. But Philadelphia insists upon its own meaning in a way that you cannot do. It seems that Didion and Williams are both right. We impose a narrative on our lives because things that happen are just things that happen and nothing more, and so we lay stones where there aren’t bodies to say we know it’s here, we know it’s somewhere around here. But things that only matter to you are as inconsequential as those blotted-out souls housed below headstones washed blank by centuries of rain and snow.

Nearly back to your Airbnb, you notice a mural you’ve not seen before hidden behind a chain link fence of a Lenape family standing on the shore of a river—the Delaware, you assume—as three tiny ships with white sails make their way towards them. There are images like this all over the Mid-Atlantic, Native Americans gazing placidly at the end of their world arriving on the seas and rivers where cities like Philadelphia now sit. In Point Pleasant there were statutes of the Shawnee Chief Cornstalk and colonial governor Lord Dunmore standing stoically side by side facing the Ohio River as the floodwall behind declared: “Each Was Fighting For Their Own Way of Life,” which is certainly one way to put it.

All at once, you are furious.

You think of the idiots online who locate themselves on the “unceded land of the whatever tribe,” the record label that makes sure to let everyone know that each of their middling-at-best garage LPs was recorded on the “unceded territory of the blah blah blah.” You find it so performative and condescending in its implication that any land is ever ceded, as if there were any option but to fight for what is rightfully yours when under threat from those who would take it and never apologize for the injustice done for it’s not injustice to them. Isn’t this entire city a monument to that idea, with its pretty manicured squares that grow green over the bodies of men who thought it better to die than suffer the tyranny of the world while concurrently believing that they should reign supreme over the worlds of other people? Why else should every building be plastered with words like “Liberty” and “Freedom,” so you never forget who won, never forget how the story ends, never question it in the first place. Nothing is ever just ceded.

But suddenly, you understand how that is not actually true and has never been true. Some things you have willingly ceded. Some things you have never fought to keep. There is the tyranny of others, and then there is the tyrant within, and only one of these reigns supreme. Only one of them makes you small. Not all suffering is optional—but maybe some of it is.

You look again at the mural of the Lenape mother holding her child, fingers curled tightly around the baby’s chubby legs. Her mouth is a thin, unsmiling line that droops at the sides, her brown eyes steely, her back turned to those infernal ships as they drift ever closer. Doom is always there.

She stares at you: Silent, unsympathetic, beyond opinion.

Who makes you feel like you don’t matter? Who tells you that you don’t belong?

You. 

You. 

You.