on mount eerie

i miss my ex

embarrassingly, i’ve been listening to a lot of mount eerie recently which is a musical project by phil elverum whose songs from 2017 on are exclusively about his dead wife. his music, once lush and lyrically dense, is now soft guitar and his voice, barely even singing, croaking out unrhyming, literal memories of his wife and the intolerable grief that follows her passing. what’s embarrassing about this is that i listen to these songs, mourning his loving wife of 13 years, slain by aggressive pancreatic cancer, and i think about my ex, someone i dated for three months who then broke up with me. how insignificant my pain is, how shallow my love for her must be in comparison to the incomprehensible magnitude of that between phil and geneviève. how horrible i am. how egoistic to hear these songs and think not of phil, living with an irreparable wound or geneviève, having lost the privilege of living, or their daughter, growing up without her mother in the shadow of death, but a girl who i met on a dating app, who i still see on a weekly basis. what i’m mourning is not her but access to her body, a salve for my own self-hatred. what do i really know about love? and i know that anyone would say that i shouldn’t see things this way, that all grief is difficult, but i know that i truly am incapable of love, if love is phil refusing to play any music he wrote before geneviève’s death, singing about his dead wife at music festivals alongside skrillex.

phil has since been in multiple relationships, and that makes me fear the limits of grief. against our will, we are made to continue living. against our will, we are made to forget. the driving force behind any grief is the will to continue feeling the pain, continue hurting oneself, because it’s the last remnant of the thing we miss. i too feel this, and, like phil, the pain gradually recedes. i find myself bizarrely envious of him, allowed to continue his grief ad infinitum. no one would fault him for being defined by his dead wife. it would be pathetic, childish, to be continually defined by my ex-girlfriend, who i dated for such a short time, who isn’t dead, who did nothing to wrong me, and who remains friends with me. there’s something perpetually embarrassing, i guess, about love. love is the recognition of dependence. love is saying “i can’t do this alone.” but one day, you’re forced to do it alone, and it’s revealed that you weren’t really telling the truth. you’re caught in a lie and at the end of the day, it’s just you, and all love and all grief fades. i don’t want to be alone, but i can be, and i’m ashamed that i consider my desire important enough to require another person. at least phil, in his desperate wishing for geneviève to still be here, is being altruistic; surely she wants to be alive too, to raise her daughter and be with her husband. but if there’s anything i’m sure of, it’s that my ex doesn’t want to be with me. how cruel to imagine her as geneviève, desperate to stay with the love of her life, when she chose to end our relationship. phil is the perfect victim of a random violence. he is entirely inculpable, a fact he wrestles with in his death songs, while i am far from innocent.

i’ve said before, and i still believe this to be true, that life is a series of intolerable losses, one single beautiful catastrophe. it’s continuous proof of how insignificant any person is, how little we know and how weak we are. phil’s song “belief,” from the third album after the death of geneviève, lost wisdom pt. 2, is about his brief relationship with michelle williams. he sings: “now i’m back where i was when i was 20 / trying to stop clinging to a dream / and let an old idea of love dissipate / back into formless rolling waves / of discomfort and uncertainty / the true state of all things / i want to wade out into dark water / hand in hand with you / i played this song for you and all you heard were the words / ‘discomfort and uncertainty’ / you asked ‘how do we get back to how it was?’ / and that’s when i started to know / that i might be in it alone.” “belief” is a song about wishing for disenchantment. phil references an older mount eerie song: “let’s get out of the romance.” the narrative, the fantasy, the romance, is not real love. real love is bearing discomfort and uncertainty hand in hand. real love is like “real death,” the first song off of a crow looked at me, phil’s first album after geneviève’s passing: “death is real / someone’s there and then they’re not / and it’s not for singing about / it’s not for making into art / when real death enters the house, all poetry is dumb.” it’s all about the fundamentally inexpressible nature of qualia. i will never know anything about geneviève’s death. i will never know anything about phil’s love. all i know is that there is someone who i love, or thought i loved, and she doesn’t love me. there’s nothing else to say about it. love is embarrassing and leaves you naked, alone, uncertain, and discomforted. skin remains the barrier keeping me from you and you from me. the difference between one and the other shall never be abolished.