I wrote this one week before disappearing.
It was Memorial Day weekend, 2022, and I was at my friend Izzy’s apartment. We were supposed to meet up with friends but instead we spent the day sunning in her backyard, drinking wine and eating cheese, playing music, talking shit. She would play one of her favorite songs and I’d play one of mine. Izzy had just seen the movie, “Blow Out,” Brian DePalma’s campfest, and she insisted I needed to see it. So we watched it in her basement. Izzy was right. I needed to see it.
Looking back, it was a nothing kind of day. We found fulfillment in the mundane, in the dirt between the cracks. I was still reeling from the pandemic, the unemployment, isolation, and social anxiety that came from it. Sharing art with a close friend brought me back to a time when we did things like that every day, when summer vacation felt like a mountain range to roam and not a block of time for scheduling doctor’s appointments. I felt robbed of time, and getting a single day back was a blast of fresh air.
So I wrote a poem about it.
There is nothing more sacred and vital than friends sharing music. Summer’s first day in the backyard heat, the neighbors crank speakers like dogs piss on trees. Me and you on cracked rubble, with Bluetooth connect. You don’t know this one, but you’ll love it.
There is nothing more radical and disruptive than friends sharing music. The rosé’s lost its cool like the sweat in my hair. You’re broke, and I’m broke, too. The world’s about to shake, we know as much. Axis slanted, just a touch, so only a few hundred thousand fall off this time. But we’ll move on without them. We’ve moved on for less.
There is nothing more haunted and heartbreaking than friends sharing music. You were alone in your room. Message unanswered. Inbox refreshed. Check one more time, just in case. Left in your lonesome, that’s when you heard her. The lights turned to strobe. The bass shook your bed frame. You felt a minor chord on the strings of your heart, another’s hand strumming them. And even though it’s day now, even though the sun won’t leave us be, I can picture the wounds on your skin and that symphonious kiss setting them free. I’ve seen you naked now, and it sounds just like this.
There is nothing more precious and rare than friends sharing music. Because they came for you, they took it all. Whatever their hands could carry. And even as they scribbled out your name and packed up your voice, as they stamped out the lines on your arm so they read as something else, as they swallowed the sky and drained out the sea, and destroyed their own lives in their victory, they could never, they could never, they could never take that.
Tone Caruso is an award-winning writer & director. His short films, “Hopelessly” and “How to Fold a Fitted Sheet,” are available on Amazon Prime. He’s worked on indie films that have premiered at SXSW, been nominated for Indie Spirit Awards, and played in theaters nationwide. Currently writing music, Tone lives in Long Beach, NY with his boyfriend and their cat, Tesla Marie.
Check out more at www.tccinemas.com