Waiting Forever For The Person You've Known For Eternity (Pt 1)
New Song This Thursday 8/8.
Here’s how I fell in love while the world fell apart.
(and why my next single is not your typical love song…)
I met my wife on Halloween 2019.
She lived in Paris; I lived in LA. We met in New York.
It never made any sense — and that was before the global pandemic.
I’d been hopelessly single for about half a decade, either so checked out from dating or, more recently at that point, chasing after people who were clearly unavailable. It made things safe in a twisted sort of way.
But each pass through the cycle I took concrete steps to work on myself, to be more open, more aligned, more in touch with what I wanted and how to actually go about allowing it to arrive1.
And I knew in the back of my head that all this work was moving me in the right direction. I was just following the wrong people down the right path.
I wrote a short phrase in the notes app on my phone and made the screenshot my wallpaper.
“Be patient. Trust the process.
Enjoy the ride.”
The morning of this big Halloween Party I gave myself one of those Good Looks In The Mirror that let you see more of yourself than you’re used to.
I loved my friends, I loved my life, and I even (sorta) loved myself — at least enough to be proud of what my surroundings reflected back to me.
That night, the party was alright, but I felt aimless2.
I’d still had high expectations, and, unsurprisingly, it wasn’t exactly what I’d dreamed up in my head. I checked my phone. I remembered to remember to let go, that I was exactly where I needed to be.
And that’s when she walked up and told me, “I’m a Galaxy.”
She was from the South of France. She was tall, she was blonde, she was freckled and sun-kissed with cheekbones like Mariel Hemingway’s and eyes so blue you might have thought she was wearing those fake contact lenses some people wear to make their eyes look blue.3
She was so everything I’d ever dreamed of that I had never actually dared to dream her up. I felt something deep in the recesses of my soul that I can only describe as a profound sense of God’s-honest spirit-to-spirit recognition. And she was a Galaxy!
And then I realized she was talking about her costume4.
At just the slightest brush of her hand against mine it was something like an electrical fire, two reunited ionic bonds that blew something open deep inside my subconscious. More than anything, it was simply a release, two things that had been held separate for so long finally coming back together for the first time in forever.
In other words, love at first sight.
We spent about 18 hours together, falling asleep on the couch at our mutual friends’ place at 8 in the morning. We woke up at 2 the next afternoon, ate bagels in a rainy Tompkins Square Park, and went our separate ways.
A few weeks later I took a plane to Paris for our first date. A few weeks after that we we met in San Francisco, then in LA, then London, then New York.
March 6th, 2020 I played a sold out show at New York’s Rockwood Music Hall and released the first single from my debut record with my new love effortlessly fitting in to my life and walking by my side. It could not have been more perfect, more exactly what I’d been waiting (even though I’d never have known it would actually look like this…)
And that’s exactly when the world fell apart.
It was the end of the very beginning, and the beginning of another end — 5 months spent quarantined across the world from each other having just found one another after searching for what felt like forever.
Time and Time Again we find each other in the end
You know it’s only in the end that we get started
But I was ready. I was patient. And I knew to enjoy the ride — one that would see me smuggling myself into Europe in the midst of a pandemic, getting everything I’d ever wanted, yet somehow still finding myself perennially discontented, watching from the countryside as the world kept burning itself to the ground.
To Be Continued…
Hit that pre-save button to help with the release — and save + stream the song when it comes out this Thursday!
Turns out that taking care of your mind and body, journaling, meditating, doing yoga and exercise, and generally feeling better about the person that you are — that makes you a lot more attractive.
Not quite as cool as it’d been hyped up to be (as very-hyped parties tend to be), but if you’d seen the Stories or the photos you’d have thought it was something out of one of those extremely unrealistic teen party movies that makes you feel shitty about your own teen parties. It was in a brownstone a few blocks too close to Penn Station with five floors and a roof, all recently retrofitted with modern touches, furniture found by an expensive algorithm or a designer who specializes in sleek angles and burnished wood. Each floor had its own theme, its own lighting display, a different vibe of music — live band on the ground floor, a silent disco on the roof, DJs playing electro and disco and deep desert trance — and all around were the faces of well-dressed groups of friends, red cup in one hand, Juul cupped surreptitiously in the other, women and boys in costumes sourced from various vintage stores, soft purples, bright reds, kaleidoscopes of velvet and lace, all with a glint of eagerness and something missing in their heavily dilated eyes. Half the rooms looked lived in and half looked plucked straight out of a corporately managed AirBnb, tasteful earth tones, cold metallic bookshelves, an oversized dreamcatcher that somehow doesn’t seem out of place.
She was not. Those are in fact her real eyes.
She’d sewn purple and gold fairy lights into a black leotard making a constellation of stars across her body. I’d bought an eye-patch for $10 on Amazon, slicked back my hair, and said I was Number Two from Austin Powers…
Perfect follow-up to running into you last night! What a description of the party too; I never Juuled though :-)