Tell You I Set You Apart: Anthems for a Thirty-Nine-Year-Old Woman
I had this friend and I was in love with her. She knew I was in love with her. And this one time, knowing that I was lonely and unhappy, she kindly said in an email that she wished there was something she could do about it. And my first impulse, a bad impulse which I didn’t act on, was to say, “Just park that car.” I would have meant it, I think, as a sort of wry comment on the emotional space between us, the space I felt we were reaching across any time we had contact with each other. But I didn’t, because I didn’t know if it would make sense to her, but also because I felt that it would read like a churlish response to her kind expression of concern, rather than an acknowledgment of the way things were. And maybe it would have been churlish.
It would have been a reference to this Broken Social Scene song, “Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl,” with its refrain of “Park that car, drop that phone, sleep on the floor, dream about me.”
And given that this song of devotion, of focus on one person and setting one person apart, is called “Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl,” I wondered if this feeling was a reflection of my teenage heart in a negative sense, something young, naive, something you’re supposed to outgrow with time and experience. (I’ve had plenty of time but, as a transgender woman who has done very little dating, not a whole lot of experience.)
This tendency to set a person apart often seems to be associated with youth, yet still I relate to it, I feel it myself. How in Gone Home the teenage Sam says of her soon-to-be girlfriend Lonnie, “You know that feeling where the first moment you see someone, it’s like they have a big gold star around them, and you have to get to know them?” Though for me it’s not the first moment I see a person. It’s after I’ve started getting to know them, and I see something real in them that I just want to be around and study and learn from.
One of my favorite expressions of devotion to a person as someone unique, special, and worthy of being set apart is from the film Say Anything. How old is Lloyd supposed to be here? He’s just graduated high school so, what, 17, like the girl in the Broken Social Scene song? But still, his attitude seems like a kind of wisdom to me. He exists in a world full of men with no ethical core whatsoever, men who have nothing real to give, who see women as interchangeable and disposable…




…but he recognizes that Diane is not interchangeable, not replaceable, and he recognizes that the love they had made him a better person, which is something that love should do.






But not all of our characterizations of this kind of devotion to an individual can be interpreted as youthful naivete. I watched Against All Odds this past week and in it, Jeff Bridges (who would have been around 34 when the film was being made) plays a man who falls hard for a woman.






His heart beats for her. She has “become everything he’s about.” It’s a neo-noir so of course their love has consequences, but she is not false in the way that so many noir women are false, and in the end, their love seems to endure, despite the fact that they cannot be together.
But this is male love, devotion, maybe obsession. It’s images and sounds of adult female devotion that I’m really looking for. So I love this cover of Coldplay’s “The Scientist” sung by Johnette Napolitano.
Her voice is so weathered. No youthful naivete this, no head in the clouds illusions about what love is.
Come up to meet you, tell you I’m sorry
You don’t know how lovely you are
I had to find you
Tell you I need you
Tell you I set you apart
Tell me your secrets
And ask me your questions
Oh, let’s go back to the start
A song about really needing a person, really wanting to know and be known by a person. “Tell you I set you apart.” Knowing that a person is not like everyone else. That they can’t be swapped out or replaced.
I want to believe that when we hold on to the idea that a person is worthy of being set apart as we get older, maybe we can find a richer, more real kind of delight. Jonathan Richman, one of the last true pop poets of love, now in his mid-60s, only seems wiser and happier in his observations about love now than he did in his 20s, as he sings about the authentic qualities that make a person special and worth knowing, worth being set apart, for him.
Well she don’t act cool, don’t act like a femme fatale
Her mystery not of high heels and eye shadow
Well she laughs, when she laughs, she’s the breeze, she’s the naturale
And she loves the faded colors of 3 AM just like I do
Notes
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