olivia rodrigo's back
and i return to a personal landmark of my own
I sit on the same high stool I sat on for my twenty-fourth birthday, watching the FIFA game on the flat screen as I wait for my shrimp tacos. I look at the bottles of Valentina and Tabasco. I stare at the couple talking behind me, nodding at how good the tacos are and over the speaker, I hear, “One Forty One!”
I wonder if he’s deleted the selfie of us yet. He never asked me if he could post it. I wonder what He tells his girlfriend about me. Nothing real, I’m sure. “She’s fucking crazy,” I’m sure. As I munch through crispy, battered shrimp, I see a Canadian flag on the tv.
Whatever, I think to myself, and then the commentators come on the screen, a 0-0 caption in front of them. Today is the Canada versus Bosnia game. Too much Valentina spills onto my tacos, and I don’t wipe it away. I chuck my finished plate at the garbage a little harder than I need to. The universe has a strange way of reminding, and I’ve always been a that’s-a-sign!-ass bitch.
The last time I was here, I was with A—, and she told me that I needed to leave the apartment so I could start feeling up to things again. She, bless her heart, tried soft love, tough love, but knew in the end, to leave me be.
Because I cried and cried and cried, she cried too, she cursed Him out and wanted so badly to chew him out. We returned to our apartment, quiet. I shut the door and threw my things on the floor and stared at my bare walls before remembering to order something that I didn’t finish eating. And I took myself on my daily after-midnight walks, listening to GUTS, Olivia Rodrigo’s sophomore album, waiting to hit my ten-thousand steps. I came home, laid in bed until three pm, got ready for class, then came home, falling comatose.
On A—’s HomePod, whenever she’d be gracious enough to let me use it (our music taste was the only real thing we ever nearly fought about)—on heavy rotation was, ballad of a homeschooled girl—internally screaming the lyrics: broke a glass, I tripped and fell/I told secrets I shouldn’t tell/I stumbled over all my words, I made it weird, I made it worse/Each time I step outside, it’s social suicide.
And I think about the time He asked me why I was sad, and I couldn’t say it was because of Him, so I told him a song I had on repeat, and he writes it down, he says, “Olivia Rodrigo, huh? I don’t know her well. But I will take a look for you. I want to know how you’re feeling.” The song was “making the bed”.
But Olivia—inferring from the lyrics from her new album, “You Seem Pretty Sad For a Girl So In Love”—also had someone asking her why she was so sad, and he couldn’t hold her feelings either.
Now, three years later, I float through the string arrangements as she remembers her “Honeybee”, it’s too hard to describe this/in a way that feels honest/but even when I’m quiet/I love you, baby I promise/I hope I never see what your face looks like goin’/A face I swear, that I could spend my whole life knowin’/here’s to hoping—almost as if she knew she’d have to say goodbye while she’d just begun learning to know what it felt like to love him.
But also—the running through the Palace of Versailles during “drop dead” made me remember the time I sat on my ex-best friend’s bed, unraveling, but in a happy way, telling her, “He let me hold his arm!” or, “He wrote me the sweetest letter!” or how I’d happen to run into him places, and he’d hold me back because he wanted to talk to me—I’d never felt an infatuation high like that before.
Only recently am I able to somewhat objectively see the beginning of something that ended catastrophically. The plate of butter chicken she’d put in my hands got placed to the side as I fell backwards onto the mattress and she had to pull me up, but I was a dead fish in water, and I didn’t even know it yet.
Because the first time he made me cry was a month into knowing him.
There is a constant reminding of insanity and unraveling throughout, until we reach “the cure”, where, in the music video, red string literally spools out of her.
And I sit in retrospective silence, flashes of a twenty-four year old me come to the forefront of my mind, and I see her like she’s on the tv instead of the game. I think of Him, two months in, asking me constantly why I was in my head—and I’d tell him I had a bad day at work, and he’d call my coworkers assholes. Or whenever he’d say something I hated, and I’d walk away quickly but he’d hold me back, he’d call me after leaving the bar after midnight and I’d lie again, “I’m tired, let’s talk tomorrow.”
In his old apartment, him speaking over my shoulder as I grip his kitchen counter, not wanting to tell him what’s really wrong with me so I say, “I’m drunk,” when I’m not. Or in a three hour follow up phone call the next day, “I’m hungover,” and I’m not. Or as he tells me to stay over—and he’s puzzled when I say no. Or when A— gives me cigarettes she knows I need and he yells at me for developing a chainsmoking habit that I haven’t—all I want to do when he scolds and controls and yells at me, “IT’S ALL YOUR FAULT! SHUT THE FUCK UP!”
And Olivia feels it too, and The Cure’s Robert Smith sings along with her—I should talk to a friend/But I can’t get out of bed/My head is spinning and my stomach is sick/Say I’m in love, so it’s hard to admit/Can’t eat, can’t sleep/I think you’re what’s wrong with me—so why the fuck would he think I’d want to stay over? But when I took space from him, the space I told him I needed, I felt like: I went to a party, but only on principle/Empty, look at me/I’m a zombie in my body/I’m a train off of the track/I feel dirty, I feel rotten/And the colors are all flat/I’m a sad shell of a woman/And I’ve got maggots for brains—
Though in the moment, I couldn’t admit these things myself. Two years later, I’ve reached the stage Olivia writes “cigarette smoke” from, I resent you/For not being brave/Tell me something honest/So the memories turn dark/You said that I made loving look easy/Until I made it hard/Give me back my time/And I will give you back your heart.
Olivia guides me through memory lane. We hold hands as we look through the looking glass together, taking our rose colored glasses off.
Her album is split into two parts, the “Girl So In Love” part is the highs, and the “You Seem Pretty Sad” part is the lows, and man, is it fucking low for a relationship a lot of us thought looked like pure love.
Olivia mourns the boy before he goes. She resents him for not standing up for her. She loves him still, in her anger, but understands that it is better to love from a far to protect her own identity, rather than be with him, and lose herself. This slow burn of losing herself, accompanied with the musical acceleration that comes through in every song and leads us to every bridge—reflects her headspace, but more importantly, her central nervous system.
Is she in love, or is she deliriously attached? This is a very important question.
It doesn’t matter what really happened between her Louis Partridge. What matters is how he made her feel. The songs are like shoes for her listeners to wear, to see things in ourselves we may not have noticed before.
Even in the music videos—which are brilliantly done—you can see that she’s self-aware, but frozen—especially in her third single release, “stupid song”, she is dancing, but she looks angry and haunted, and holds her corps de ballet from crossing the street somewhere on the Upper West Side.
And that’s what sets You Seem Pretty Sad For a Girl So In Love apart from SOUR and GUTS. It showcases her natural progression, artistically, aesthetically, and emotionally, while staying true to who she is—a musician who transmutes her experiences as honestly as she can.
In her first two albums, we felt her angst, her jealousy, her sorrow towards her other exes, Joshua Bassett, Adam Faze, (Zack Bia?) and how small she felt in comparison to that blonde girl—Sabrina Carpenter (don’t come at me, I’ve been a Sabrina Carpenter fan since “honeymoon fades”).
As she enters her mid-twenties, there is more nuance, more admission of how she is complicit in her own dysfunction. There’s maturity—in a recent interview, when asked about Carpenter and a potential collaboration, she laughs and says she’s open to all forms of collaboration. War is over!
But that’s not to say the angst is lost—listen to “my way”.
And what strikes me most is how realistic it all feels. To hold yourself accountable, though you aren’t in a place to make entirely rational decisions. To subliminally be aware of something creeping under the surface, but being too afraid to look. She’s not romanticizing it, but creating a keepsake of it, a “time capsule”, as she describes it.
As I walk through the market, the headlights by the Chelsea Market clock are orange and blue—Knicks in five!!—and wondering where I’ll go to see the game tomorrow—I think about how he must be having the time of his life right now. I smile thinking about how I told him to watch One Tree Hill—then my stomach twists, and bitterly I mutter to myself, “Fuckass Canadian poser. Get out of my city.”
I continue to sit in retrospective silence. I replay the little moments of his love that I fact-check with my friends now. It’s not grief, it’s research. It’s for this essay.
Some think Him wanting to listen to “making the bed” was love bombing, or hyper-performative. Perhaps. My thesis advisor seems to think that because of his incongruous self-states cannot differentiate when he is performing a task for validation, or because he feels genuine love.
I’d like to think it was a genuine act of love—but what does it matter?
I think what matters more, is how it made me feel, to observe that, to see how this present version of me can hold the twenty-four year old version of me, in hopes that this kind of love never finds me again. I think that’s the note Olivia leaves off on as well, bitter and hollow/You will never know my sorrow/Why’d I try at all/Tell me something honest/So the memories turn dark.
