I just released the happiest breakup song in the world :)

In this picture, I’m 23 years old, and I’m in Iceland with my best friend Jodie. A few days before the picture is taken, I play at Iceland Airwaves. At the time, it’s one of the biggest shows I’ve played, my second ever showcase show, the first show my band and I get on a plane for. It’s exciting. There’s a full room of people I’ve never met, bar a few friends and peers in the audience, smiling. I spend the subsequent three days out dancing and having hotel-room sex until Jodie flies out to see me early Sunday morning.

I meet her at the airport; we rent a car that’s far too small to face the Icelandic winds and drive into this weird alien countryside. It’s like nothing either of us had seen before. We stop at big rocks with sweeping repetitive patterns, ice laid out at their feet and cracking under ours. Jodie knows me better than to try and make sense of anything. It is one of her kindest gifts: that she never tries to fix or explain or pathologise. She lets me be a strange version of myself, talking about most things, bar the big thing.

At the cabin, we drink hot chocolate in the geothermal hot tub because we couldn’t find wine on the way. It’s a good thing. The sky is beautiful, and my head is clear for the first time in weeks. I tell her it hurts in my own incoherent way. I don’t cry in front of her. In the evening, we stay up waiting for the northern lights and I know that I’m the heaviest anticipation in the room. She watches the sky and watches me watch the sky. I try and relinquish expectation, but I feel my insides properly, embarrassingly desperate to see them: I believe in signs. We talk to distract ourselves and make jokes about it not happening to soften the blow, I keep checking the app I’ve downloaded, and it keeps pushing the ‘time of possible sighting’ back and back, further away. I think three hours passed this way, but equally, all time was stretched out and mangled then, such was the nature of the grief.

A turquoise, iridescent beast grows out from behind a sepia cloud. Jodie points behind me, I turn my head, and I watch it dance. It moves and wafts far behind the sky. I wonder intensely if it makes a sound or not, way up there. How majestic the silence of it is. She takes this picture without my knowing. The beautiful beast stays for 15 minutes or so and then goes. When it does, Jodie takes the double bed meant for me and someone else, and I fold myself small on the sofa, waiting up for more. Hours pass this way, until 5 or so in the morning, I drink many more hot chocolates and watch the film ‘Frozen’ twice back to back, pausing when the green dips down from the sky, stepping outside into the cold and letting it wash over my face until it coaxes my own emotion from me.

A year or so later, long after the dust has settled and I’ve built a life far larger than my grief, I make the instrumental for a song. I write the drum pattern, the interlocking piano lines, and a bass part. I sit and listen to it with the window wide open. It sounds like summer. I try to think of a story that could be happy enough for it. And I think of that night, that glimmer peaking out behind the clouds, the love of Jodie and my other friends in the months that followed, everything that loss invited me to become. I think about the bright sign that is someone leaving, the great open door you must walk through. I think of what I would have wanted to say to the person who left, had I been in a place to see beyond my own pain, and I write quickly in my phone notes:

‘go

turn into someone i don’t know

it’s only heavy if you hold it too long

so baby while we’re young

you should go

turn into somebody i’ll miss

let’s leave the party with a kiss and run

oh baby while it’s fun

you should go’

‘go!’, my latest single, is out now :)