I had seen it on Facebook several weeks prior and bought a ticket without a second's hesitation. (Josh playing solo? Fuck yes I'm there.) N. had seen that I was going and jealously bought himself a ticket, insisting on accompanying me, although I had planned to ask Meg. Fortunately the relationship fell apart before the concert (I was sad about it, but more tired than anything else), and Meg had bought his ticket; but then car troubles prevented her from going, so I went by myself. It was the second concert I'd attended alone in a month, and I found myself strangely liberated by the experience. The opening numbers were great. Josh Ritter is a joy to watch, a joy to hear, and so delighted by the audience's delight, as if he can't believe that other people like listening to him.
And then his fingers began picking out the chords to "Thunderbolt's Goodnight," the song I'd longed with all my being to hear that night, and I clapped my hands to my mouth while the tears started pouring silently down my face.
I didn't know the name of the song at that point; the album on which he finally included it wouldn't be released for another three months. All I knew was the debt I owed him for that song. The first time I'd heard it, packed into the Royal Oak Music Theater next to Meg, I was exhausted and sad. Things with Chris weren't going well -- hadn't been for the bulk of the relationship. He kept insisting he wanted the relationship to work. I was trying so hard. But I felt lonely, all the time, especially when we were together; his thoughts were always anywhere but with me. There was no intimacy. We never talked. About anything, ever. I still thought we could make it work -- I thought I had to try.
Until I heard that song. When I heard Josh Ritter sing "Thunderbolt's Goodnight" for the first time, I knew that I would break up with Chris. Because I knew that I would never have with him the things I needed. I knew that he had never felt that way about me, and never would. And I knew that in the art of losing, what seemed like disaster would turn out to be something else.
And all my life
Before I met you
When I was trying hard in love
I thought the sun
Was going down
But the sun was coming up
My relationship with Chris ended a few weeks after I heard that song. Now, having just ended my relationship with N., I listened to it for the second time, and, weeping, knew that I'd done the right thing. (I'm sure the poor people on either side of me thought I was a lunatic; I was crying so hard I couldn't keep the gulpy hitches in my breath altogether quiet.) It was the kind of weeping that heals -- an outpouring of grief that resolves into hope. In that dark, exquisitely intimate little theater, I fixed my swollen eyes on Josh and let the chords wash over me. The sun was coming up. I didn't know how or when, but I knew it would.
For all my rage over the ways in which systemic sexism impedes women in relationships, for all my disappointments over past relationship failures, for all my determination to do things differently going forward, and for all my fierce delight in my current single state, I have never given up hope. I know exactly what I'm looking for -- I always have; that hasn't changed -- and now I think I finally have a clear understanding of what it looks like, and an even clearer resolve to settle for nothing less. Every relationship that I have voluntarily shed, I have shed because the relationship could go no further -- and because of my hope for the better things to come.
I'm not trying so hard, now. I'm okay on my own. I'm still resting. But the life I have founded here in Detroit, once I've emerged from hibernation, is the life in which I'll finally be in a good place to have the relationship I've always wanted. Maybe I won't find it; I want what I had the only time I ever really deeply connected with someone, and I don't know how likely it is that I'll find that again. It's so rare, and so precious. And if I don't find it a second time, that's okay; I will always make the best life possible for myself, and I enjoy my own company. And if I do -- well. That will be amazing.
It's likely that I would still be sitting here writing about this if I hadn't attended those concerts and heard Josh sing that simple, aching song. But in his hands and from his mouth that longing, that hope, that profound gratitude crystallized into a sense of purpose for me, both times, and drove me forward, so that after the solo concert, I drove back to Detroit in the late-night darkness with the fragrance of June pouring through the windows, and I felt light, and free, and washed clean.
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