a sonic photograph of falling in love

kind and honest eyes, the bittersweetness of loving someone, and hearing someone sing in the kitchen

I am writing this with my seven week old son sleeping on my chest, my arms crammed beneath him at an angle where I can peck this out on my computer keyboard, the ever-so-slightly paler autumn light streaming in through the picture window. I have a new song out today called Kind and Honest. It’s a sonic photograph of falling in love.

I love the simplicity of this song—I love the gratitude it makes me feel for feeling the essence of a person. For seeing them in their eyes, for the mind movies we play to remember them when they’re somewhere else. We shift and change and so does love, and our songs and love letters are just memorials—snapshots of moments in time. Loving someone is bittersweet, it’s dark chocolate, it’s vinegar, it’s the sun setting just below the tree line, it’s always flowing like water through your fingers and you can’t hold onto it. That’s what makes it so gorgeous.

I read a piece of writing today by Joy Sullivan, a truly heartbreaking poet, that stopped me in my tracks.

I have been thinking a lot lately about the world into which my husband and I brought this baby. (Kind and Honest is about the man I created this being with) I don’t know exactly what I’m going to teach him about college, career, politics, owning a home, the economy, or the future. Everything feels insane—perhaps reality, or perhaps reality with a hefty dose of hypernormalization. At any rate, I seem to have been hearing the electrician singing in the kitchen, because here he is. Seemingly against all odds, we keep falling in love, dreaming of the future, and sometimes even having babies.

Kind and Honest is a quiet celebration of this. The ruthless passage of time gives birth to memories we come back to again and again—a child looking down at us from a tree—swallows in murmuration—someone’s eyes, flickering in our memory like a memorial. I hope you enjoy it.

XO,

Audrey