It was a brutal winter’s night. Fragile but brutal. There was ice dangling in the air, too cold to drip. Smoke curling from the only glow in that darkness – the lit end of a cigarette, because we were smoking the hurt away. We dismissed our concerns with a flick of fingers and a sentiment cribbed from ‘Cabaret’: divine decadence. The wave goodbye, over the shoulders, was even less than the efforts that the wisp of a silk scarf made. We were young then, careless with our hearts, and, so much worse, careless with the hearts of others. We did it to make it through the winter. If there was warmth to be found in that decadence – in the burn of a cocktail, in the embers of a cigarette, in the arms of a stranger – I don’t think I found it. The traces of it, the echoes of it, the hints and peeks and dusty remnants of it – they never added up to anything more than a want or a wish, and as much as I wanted them to come together in something of substance, they disappeared like the smoke from my mouth, all too quickly melting into whatever formed the black night air of that winter.
Who better than Marianne Faithfull to give voice and music to such a night? Who better to give voice to such a winter?
In the weeks leading up to Valentine’s Day, I would visit my friends at Cornell. Suzie was a fellow cynic when it came to love, perhaps even more acerbic at times than me. My broken heart’s club wasn’t assembled because the men fucked us over – it’s because the men never fucked us at all. Not the kind of fucking that was on my wish list. I wanted it all – and the men I knew then could only provide bits and pieces of it.
And so that winter was populated by the boozy, smoky nights where we found solace in approximating the divine decadence of someone like Sally Bowles – a creature as lost as we often felt, encased in her tattered fashion and solitary style. I listened to Marianne Faithfull, whose voice was the embodiment of smoke itself, and the desperation of winter.
Fall burned in a way that winter never would.
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