Crushing

CRUSHING is just one of those words, one of those words that itself is like a poem.. To crush: to love, to want, to long for, to sometimes need. To crush: to be break into pieces, to snap something in half, to step on something, to ruin.

Another word like this that comes to mind is suck. To suck: to keep in one’s mouth, to hold between your lips like a lollipop, to tongue around, to sometimes give someone pleasure with one’s wetness. To suck: to not be good, to be terrible, to be a fucking bummer.

Oh, that reminds me, fuck, also. To fuck: you know, to have sex with, to make love, to act on one’s passion. Fuck (just fuck on its own): shit, goddammit, ugh, something is wrong.

Crush, suck, fuck: they express the duality of love, the way it intertwines so casually with pain and regret.
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The first time I listened to Julia Jacklin, I cried. Her album Crushing came out months before I’d heard of it. Released in February of 2019, it’s an intimate indie album meant for the winter—to keep you warm while you stay inside, well aware of your loneliness during cuffing season. I found it in the fall, with the encroachment of ache upon me, both of cold and of heartbreak. My relationship fell apart as the winter was born. Two years, blown away in the New York wind, sweeping me into the arms of anyone who could make me forget this fact. I was alone.

Her ballads range from endearing to menacing, from funny to painful, from snarky to defeated. No matter what, though, every track contains overflowing emotion. 

“Good Guy”

Tell me I’m the love of your life
Just for a night
Even if you don’t mean it

The guitar in the song is soft, softly strumming in the background, barely there. Jacklin’s honesty is the centerpiece, requesting love; I think about when someone I was in love with texted me: Why are you asking someone to love you? Because that’s what love is, that’s how love works—love is an emotion that can only be shared when it’s stripped to its core. It’s naked, humiliating, dramatic, painful, exciting. “Good Guy” sounds simple, but this act of begging and pleading showcases the complexity of love, of loneliness, of humans. In that way, it is revolutionary, basking in its own tragedy.

I don’t care for the truth when I’m lonely
I don’t care if you lie
I don’t care if in the morning
You get up not saying goodbye
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So it was fairly ironic for me to get rejected and hurt by a guy at a Julia Jacklin show in November of 2019 where the background music was live renditions of songs about getting rejected and hurt. After sneaking in three airplane bottles of three different liquors in the cuff of my jeans, I meandered around the venue drunkenly, getting trapped in conversations and losing focus and sinking into feelings of loneliness. It ended with everyone dancing as she covered Avril Lavigne; everyone seemed happy, and that felt wrong and fraudulent. We should all be seeing Julia Jacklin because we’re in agony. I left, and I drove in a dizzy haze to the apartment of someone on a dating app. We drank more rum and he made me tea as a chaser. Our sex was slow and as burdening as it was freeing. It would take a long time for me to shed the intrusive guilt; my ex would hate me forever, I was sure of it. The next morning I walked into the bright, cold Brooklyn streets and was not the same person, but I was still naïve. 

I left my black fur coat on his chair, and I knew it—as I left, I knew it. A few days later, my best friend Alex and I were getting drunk and walked from Bushwick to Ridgewood, we were near his street, and I asked if I could pick it up. We sat freezing on his steps as he was walking from the subway train to his apartment. I’d looked him up online, scrolled through this twitter, watched his short films, read the descriptions. He arrived and I took excessive sips of my airplane bottle of whiskey. When he let us in, I watched him fidget with pieces of a camera that looked like they made up a giant piece of machinery. Are you taking that apart or putting it together? I asked. He answered: Putting it together, hopefully. At this point, he definitely regretted having a one-night-stand with a girl seven years his junior. I wanted to say something, to ask him for something, to extend what ended—I was not satisfied, I’d never be satisfied.