On Repeat

the songs I haven't stopped replaying

April 2017

In college, Sean showed me the song, “If I Wanted Someone” by Dawes, which we played in the car as we drove to a party at 1600 University Avenue, myself DD’ing like usual, him already a few beers in.

Like the memory from your mother's house
From before you got too old
Like the feeling from a photograph
Before it's meanings all got told
The words I say can be silver
But what's left unsaid can be gold
So get to know me once I go away

It was controversial at the time for me to hang out with Sean, a known playboy who’d broken a few hearts in our greater community. I was still good friends with his ex-girlfriend Rose, who he’d dated the year before I met him. Sean was a Scorpio, boyish and sturdy with slight curling hair and sailor eyes. He liked to put a pen behind his ear and pause emphatically before saying disparaging, belligerent things to people. He had the most tortured wannabe Jack Keraouc aesthetic I’d seen since I set foot on campus, which I found amusing.

I was his upstairs neighbor sophomore year of college. We met when I went down to tell him the handyman needed to get into both of our apartments for some plumbing issue. He flung open the door to greet me, shirtless. I snorted slightly and brusquely informed him of the situation. He said this made him trust me. As soon as I started inviting him to parties in my unit two of the other girls in our building gained crushes on him immediately.

Sean fancied himself a tragic figure, from a poorer part of St Louis, living in his older brother’s shadow. He was really good at writing, but had failed out of journalism school and was now merely an English major.

Maybe 'cause I come from such an empty-hearted town
Or maybe 'cause some love of mine had really let me down
But the only time I am lonely is when others are around
I just never end up knowing what to say

I enjoyed his companionship and thought his sweeping prose was endearing and even impactful at times. We never worked on anything together, nor really participated in any substance abuse or grand scale adventures. Nevertheless, we enjoyed meandering conversations about the state of affairs. Sean was notably not fun to gossip with, mostly because he was usually feeling angsty about the state of the world. I tried to comfort him as best I could.

Sean was pretty hot, sure, but I knew better than to notice. Besides, he didn’t like Dostoevsky, which I took as a sign he was only performing darkness. Sean liked poets instead, but I looked down at his penchant for sleeping with the wrong women and then making art about it. All the girls wanted to fuck Sean because they wanted to get in the bed of an accursed poet who would inevitably treat them like trash, except me. I was special because I was just there to talk to Sean about Infinite Jest. Recursive writing that’s opaque to everyone but a select few is the best kind, he said. Sean speculated if I wanted to fuck David Foster Wallace. Probably true, although hard to say since I was a virgin. I just hung out while I heard in passing about Sean’s exploits. He was the classic bad boy, while I was the voyeur watching him break heart after heart, relieved it’d never be me.

If I wanted someone to clean me up, I'd find myself a maid
If I wanted someone to spend my money, I wouldn't need to get paid

The kingpin of dealbreakers was Sean didn’t have an infinite accursed curiosity, the way, I the noble journalist who was covering a nation divided, did. He once told me he didn’t want to be happy because he wanted to be able to make art forever, and what basis would he have to make more if his life got peaceful? The lyrics of his favorite song showed this accurately, and for this I was always grateful - Sean was at least honest, in a time where my reporting classmates used up all their bandwidth for integrity on the fantasy of journalistic objectivity while engaging in petty power games in every other regard. I remember Mike asking me at the annual newspaper mixer how I could be so bubbly and popular yet so serious and prolific on the job. He thought I was a contradiction. Sean told me fuck that noise. He didn’t do a great job convincing me to not care, as I saw this was the essential part of what divided me, a serious writer, from him, who used writing as a balm for his own trauma. But I would never do that, obviously ever in the near future, because there was work to be done!

I curtly told Sean, constantly, that I wanted to be happy so I’d never had to make art ever again, that the curse of having to write was what followed me around every day, and I did not in fact like it.

Well that sucks, he said, because your voice is the best I’ve read in a while. Everyone agrees with me. You are so raw and precise. You should be proud of that.

My voice is humiliating, I thought. All I have is my feelings.

If I wanted someone to understand me, I’d have so much more to say
I want you to make the days move easy

I met Sean in 2014, and as he was a year older, I didn’t see him for a while after he left campus. It was only in spring 2017, when I was visiting St. Louis with a mere two months til graduation and we were out at a party in some guy’s backyard, that I told him I’d missed him. In tribute, I wanted to show him something. He was standing next to where I was perched on top of a trash can. Drunk on nostalgia for my soon to be gone college years, I handed him my iPhone 7, on which I’d pulled up a Google Doc with his name at the top. It was a ‘portrait’ of him. I’d started rendering people as I saw them, I said, instead of narrativizing like I had to for my job and like I did in exculpating myself on my Wordpress blog. I captured every detail I could in a long-lost pamphlet of sorts, hoping he’d like it. Sean was silent for a second, and I feared I’d offended him, or worse, that it was bad. Sean? I asked. Are you good?

He lunged toward me, cigarette in one hand, bottle in another, and said I could kiss you. I chuckled, thinking he was kidding. He didn’t slur though, so maybe not?. Then he leaned in more, threw the cigarette out of his hand and grabbed my waist. He told me that he didn’t know I had a remotely sexualized view of him (maybe because I opened with the shirtless anecdote). I shrunk back and pushed him away, What the fuck!

You’ve slept with so many girls, you’re a womanizer, I hissed, and you have the audacity to make me one of your victims. I thought I’d be special to you as your only platonic female friend, and you’re ruining it! I gave this portrait to you in a moment of tenderness, and now this?

VICTIMS? He cried. I have a heart too, how could you say that? He backed away with a wounded expression of fury and apprehension, and threw up his hands in frustration.

You’re just so dense, he said, I don’t know what made you this way but I don’t know how to get through to you!

What are you talking about??? You’re the one who didn’t ever tell me you’re into me, I yelled, and you spring this on me!!

How could I be into you when you fence yourself off from everyone, Sean yelled back. You refuse to look at it, you refuse to notice it, you’re too busy stuck in your whole “I’m a journalist” shtick to give a fuck about the real people in front of you!

I got mad and blacked out. Apparently I just went home after that. Sean messaged me the next day to apologize. I admitted there was something there, but I didn’t want to look at it too much because I needed a friend more than a fling. We agreed that perhaps one day, if we were both single in the same city again, we’d have a night of passion out on the town just to see.

Over the years, Sean would message me about how am I doing once in a while. We’d make small talk. He admired me moving to LA and quitting journalism. We never really talked about that night again.

I saw Sean last summer here in New York. He lives in Mexico City now. He has an ordinary life as a business man selling techware. He got a tarot reading from me with his girlfriend, who is very sweet, at a Bedstuy bar. I recalled the first time I read his still-familiar chart, as one of the first I’d practiced on in the early years of my astrology training. I bit my tongue when I thought about telling him to write again and finish that novel. He might move to New York.

I want you to make the days go easy…

Feb 2019

Caleb was loud, obnoxious. He had a frat star affect but could write way better than you’d assume. He’d sexualize his sources and joke about chugging beers but whip up great copy even while hungover. Caleb was my coworker at my very first and only full time journalism job as a political reporter in a suburb of Los Angeles. Before he joined us, Caleb worked for the local radio station. He sauntered up to me during a city council meeting and announced he would soon join me at the newspaper, that he knew I was Crystal Duan, and that he liked my work. When Caleb said it it landed as not a surprise.

We were always bickering, always chasing each other around the office. Caleb always knew how to say the exact thing that would start a fight, usually something full of bravado that flattened a source into an archetype that he narratively anticipated would make me, the conservative proud ‘on top of her shit’ star reporter, try to correct him. He called me a classic teacher’s pet and thought it was funny that I took myself so seriously, but it was only because he took himself equally serious. I liked that he had depth beneath his overly rambunctious personality. I defended him to the other coworkers, who all thought he was too full of himself and too main character for their taste, but my stance was that we spent so much time blending into the background that it was refreshing to be around people with a lust for life who could deliver. Maybe it was also me trying to redeem the cognitive dissonance I also felt about being a serious writer yet also sort of a troll. We were chronically overworked to where we couldn’t even crawl out of the office early enough to ever get drinks together, but knowing I could bitch to Caleb at the end of the day always felt amazing. We reliably would smirk at each other from across the cubicles.

Caleb had once told me if he could do anything with his life, he would go and be a foreign correspondent. He had dropped out of UC Santa Barbara years ago for being depressed/probably being an alcoholic, and he told me he stayed in his hospital bed looping Bo Burnham’s “Art is Dead” over and over to get up the will to live again.

Art is dead
Art is dead

Entertainers like to seem complicated
But we’re not complicated
I can explain it pretty easily
Have you ever been to a birthday party for children?
And one of the children
Won’t stop screaming
‘Cause he’s just a little attention attractor

When he grows up
To be a comic or actor
He’ll be rewarded
For never maturing
For never understanding or learning
That every day
Can’t be about him
There’s other people
You selfish asshole

One day, we were pre-gaming the holiday party. I asked him to help me with the zipper on my dress, since everyone else was late and it looked like it was going to be just us in the Uber. He fumbled it into place, then wandered outside to wait for the car. As I looked at my phone, he wandered back over to me, gave me a hug from behind, and slurred that we shouldn’t hook up. I had three shots of tequila in me and started, not knowing why he’d say that to me. I hadn’t been trying, but now it was out of the question. I felt embarrassed as fuck that maybe he’d caught me slipping into brief fantasy about this, and the need to defend myself overtook me in my drunken stupor.

We argued in the car the whole 20 minutes there. I said why not? He said it wasn’t appropriate. I fumed. We had chemistry! We were the best pair on this side of LA. What, am I not good enough for you?

My drug's attention, I am an addict
But I get paid to indulge in my habit
It's all an illusion
I'm wearing make-up
I'm wearing make-up

I blacked out after a few more beers at the holiday party, threw up in the toilet during the awards (luckily I didn’t get one) and went home. I furiously texted him about leading me on but also making it weird by bringing it up anyway when I was also going to ignore our obvious sexual tension?? He accused me of trying to grab his dick in the car. Who knows if I did. But also who cares? He’s sleeping with so many other girls. Why not me???

Caleb pressed on, saying if this was a reversed #MeToo that I would’ve been called out for sexual harassment. I sputtered angrily that that def wouldn’t have happened and he should watch his tone and how everyone says shit about him. He said ignore me. I said gladly.

And so we did ignore each other awkwardly, the week before the Christmas break, the whole office knew something was up. It was a lot quieter, my editor joked. Caleb and I kept running into each other in the breakroom, outside by the parking lot. Happy New Year came and went. I wished I could talk to him at midnight. Then I wrote him a “late Christmas” card that I missed him. Soon, he was back at my cubicle smirking at me, as if nothing happened. We didn’t talk about that holiday party.

I am an artist, please God forgive me
I am an artist, please don’t revere me
I am an artist, please don’t respect me
I am an artist, you’re free to correct me

Four months later, I got fired from my job rather unceremoniously; seems a source didn’t like me. It’d been a long time coming, but this sadly signaled the end of my journalism career. I had hung on for years now, two to be exact since I’d foreseen Trump era #1 leading to the degradation of my institution, as I saw the dynasty of traditional media disappearing and known that my days with a paying job were numbered. If this job didn’t work out (and I did hate it, because we had to finish 3 articles a day for a small daily that was always getting edits called in that politically favored the affiliartions of the publisher…), I knew I was going to have to choose between staying in a city I wanted to and the career I’d worked for but had been showing signs of obsoletion. Layoffs piled up around the country. I had already been applying for jobs at the LA Times that kept disappearing on account of the mandatory restructuring under a publisher who’d eventually let it run itself into the ground years later anyway. This might be the end.

Caleb was out of the office. I fumbled in despair with my things. Tammy brought them outside for me in a crate as I leaned against my car trunk, trying to stop shivering. I grabbed my phone with trembling hands and called Caleb, crying. He met up with me the next day. We got drinks where he told me to be careful about not getting exploited, that it was a tricky situation, and I was better off walking away now before things exploded. He said I’d prob have to work hard and leave LA, but that I could still make it as a journalist. I said I didn’t want to. He asked why not. I got pissed. Well you don’t wanna leave your home, I said. Why are you telling me to? I can’t remember what he said back.

I cried for days and wouldn’t eat. Caleb tried to console me over text. Before I’d left the office on that final day, I put my Detective Pusheen plushie on his desk, the one he’d always harassed me with. Weeks later I heard someone asked him about why he had it. He said haughtily you wouldn’t get it. I took that as a sign he missed me.

A self-centered artist
Self-obsessed artist
I am an artist
I am an artist

Eventually I asked him if I was a lost cause. He sent back paragraphs about how every day at work, I’d brought the sunshine to the office, and it motivated him to be better. It motivated him to try and imitate me, pissed that even at his finest, I would mog him with an ending he could never nail. But he also said that it didn’t even matter because I was so kind, so willing to be helpful and collaborative, that he had faith in me and to not let this break my spirit. I waited a day to respond because the immensity of this admission overwhelmed me so much - as if affirming that maybe his desire for me was real, and the reason we hadn’t hooked up was because of these intense feelings.

He never responded even after I double texted a few times. I didn’t know why but lacked the courage to reach out and break whatever peace he might have needed. I instead turned and marched toward my next chapter that culminated in being a high ticket freelance marketer and celebrity tarot reader.

Last I checked on Caleb he lives in San Diego now basically married to the girl who took my position after me. In New York, I am best friends with his high school friend, who I met by coincidence in an elevator.

But I'm just a kid
I'm just a kid
I'm just a kid, kid
And maybe I'll grow out of it

April 2025

I meet John at a Halloween party in San Francisco in October. Anxious WASP, hypochondriac, nervous but incredibly sweet. I thought he might be gay because he was so bubbly. Even though he’s from the Southwest, he has a name that’s regal and makes everyone raise an eyebrow upon hearing it. He doesn’t act like American royalty though because he’s a “lowly AI engineer,” in his words. John looks like a cuter version of Richard Hendricks in Silicon Valley, which he would bristle at that comparison I think. But when we talked about books and ideas he lit up in a refreshing way. We talk about New York, where he says he wants to end up at some point.

He texts me my own tweet at 2am the night of our encounter. The tweet proclaims that any cute guys who want to see the Crime and Punishment ballet together should come out. He flirtatiously volunteers himself in a manner he later says he regretted because at the time he thought he’d never see me agian. At the time of the text we agree to get boba and go on a walk the next day before I fly out.

John was a philosophy major at a liberal arts school with a simple computer science minor and a dream of becoming a professor until some ‘family stuff’ made him have to become primary breadkeeper. On this walk, where we look into each other’s eyes smiling like we’re in the musical La La Land, we agree to stay in touch via a virtual Dostoevsky book club. We both like the book Notes From the Underground, which I take as a sign John is someone special and different, because no one who’s this cutesy and who also likes that book could be boring right.

A few days later, we’re texting and he tells me it was rare for him to connect with someone like we’d did, and showed me the Dostoevsky quote, “I want to share everything with one person as I would myself.” Suddenly, for the first time, I had a man who wanted to talk to me all the time about ideas. He told me he wanted to not be seen as a tech bro, and for someone to see him as the philosopher king he’s given up years ago. I eagerly obliged. We shared each other’s Spotify Wrapped for that year. His top song was “Better In The Dark” by TV Girl.

When I saw you standing there
With the dyed-up blonded hair
They said that you had clout
I said I didn't care

I liked that in my head, John’s adoring expressions were because he was looking at me like his disavowed anima. I ignored noticing that people said he had dated many Asian girls, as one of my friends called me ‘one of his Asian girls’ too. Well, that’s just because everyone’s an Asian girl software engineer in SF, I thought to myself.

Two weeks after we meet, John announces to me during book club that he’s moving to New York with his brother who currently resided in their hometown. They had a startup together and were gonna try it out. I was ecstatic.

John after all had become my shelter from the life I’ve built for myself here in NYC. Here, I am the contact for the greater Twitter/wholesome Internet ‘tpot’ scene. I host parties, I run events, I work as a COO for multiple in-scene companies. Everyone knows me as driven and hurried and brusque. No one thinks of me as an ex-breaking news reporter who read so many books as a kid that she memorized stories regimented until she could spot them everywhere.

John shared my dreams/grief combo, as he also said he couldn’t keep being a philosopher and was ‘intellectually starved.’ I drank in a story of us as two ex artists, who could survive the landscape of the intersection of art and technology by lingering on the cross walk.

When the liquor was all clear
I could see you through the glass
There's something I could tell you
But I forgot to ask

In the shadow of the stars
The lighter makes a spark
But I look better in the dark
I look better in the dark

Shortly before the move happened, John asked me about my feelings and clarified he wanted to be just friends. He said our conversations felt ‘not platonic’ (they lasted 4 hours each week) and that if both of us got partners, this might be a problem. I asked why we weren’t compatible in his eyes. He refused to elaborate other than that he was a ‘hyper monogamous person.’ I freaked out but assumed I could get answers once he was here in person.

Then he moved here and ceremoniously got a new girlfriend, a basic Asian girl indeed, within the first month of being here, before I even had a chance to hang out with him more than once. He also would travel literally every month since moving here, to the point where our schedules could never sync up because he didn’t seem to want to be here, or merge our lives. Eventually, he revealed to me his ex from college also lives in NYC and is a grad student in philosophy. He had decided, on the basis of his previous failed relationship with her, that he couldn’t handle a partner with whom he wanted to argue all the time, as it was too destabilizing and it had gone badly with her. He insisted our ideas of relationships were too different.

Do you think it would be weird
If I dropped into a dream?
Always the first to know
Always the last to leave

John said he wanted to build a friendship anyway, which I in my humiliated state agreed to, but not before crashing out about this while crying at him in public in Prospect Park one sunny day in April, and writing a blog post in fantasy wishing for him to yearn to share with me as I wanted to share with him. I even suggested we start a philosophy group to share the burden of being around each other. He said sorry that he could only control what he did, not what he felt, which left me with more humiliating hope. I watched him as he treated each meeting of ours with more and more of an arms length. He ghosted me after I called him out for overthinking my mere texts to schedule things.

If you’re sober in the morning
We can always just pretend
That you’re drunk on your way home
And the party didn’t end

When the sunlight meets the dawn
You’ll see I’m not the one you want
‘Cause I look better in the dark

Feb 2026

I met Robby recently. A writer, when I had noted that no writers ever stirred passion in me until now. I walked in to Opera House in Chinatown kinda expecting an entertaining interaction that would be ultimately just another fun anecdote.

Before the date, I wouldn’t have admitted it, but I wanted Robby’s style. He had a marching cadence to his writing I had never mastered because I wanted to just rush to the capital P Point. He was probably too patient for the readers’ own good at times. But he could detachedly dissect things without coloring them with his own biases. This I envied. At his best, he has a regal prose that reminds me of who I could’ve been if I had been braver and pursued my novelist dreams instead of sullying them with the credentials of professional scoop-slavery.

I peacocked as hot and sexy and popular and psychoanalytically precise, painting a gilded picture of me as a former journalist turned social organizer who still ignores occasional freelance assignment calls from the Washington Post (they don’t know I’ve moved out of LA). I felt embarrassed throughout and assumed he could see through my LARP. I thought he’d imply critically that I’m a disgrace for not dying for art, that I’ve given in to the technocrats and their regime by forsaking my birth right to be a writer, that I’m a failed artist and a traitor, that my aesthetic is cringe, that I’ve given away everything by walking away from journalism and only writing cringe confessional slop.

If my words did glow with the gold of sunshine
And my tunes were played on the harp unstrung
Would you hear my voice come through the music?
Would you hold it near as it were your own?

Robby did not tell me these things. Robby actually listened to me, which at first I didn’t notice. I thought Robby was just disinterested from how little he said to my word salads, even though I knew him as a person who had a lot going on inside. Soon I started to notice he was actually intrigued instead of bored.

Robby responded, briefly but precisely, to everything I said to him about myself, always as seriously as if it had been said by a properly respectable Individual, not a heretic to the scene. He told me to stop calling myself an ex-writer, for how could I ever stop being one? How many days would have to pass between his own pieces before he was also an “ex-writer”? I braced myself for harshness, dismissiveness that never came. He once told me that I was a great writer, and with some light editing my blog could be ‘really good.’ I bristled and deigned to say I hadn’t even begun to try yet, and he quickly interjected that some of his earlier writing also needed revision. Maybe that was an invitation to edit my stuff. I took it as a sign I didn’t have what it took, never mind that I was honestly just too precious to attempt to be ‘good’ anymore.

It’s a hand-me-down, the thoughts are broken
Perhaps they’re better left unsung
I don’t know, don’t really care
Let there be songs to fill the air

I yearned for Robby’s approval so badly I couldn’t even hear his words anymore, no matter the valence, because I was trying to control my own output instead of listening for how he was engaging with me. If he really was responding in delight, it felt so unbearably enticing I disavowed it. I had already decided that he was there to judge me, and so all I could hear from my loud inner voice is keep pretending you’re cool. Keep pretending you’re unaffected. Because if he saw how much you hold inside, he’d just humiliate you, wouldn’t he?

Suddenly every Gracie Abrams song became relevant. A catalog of fussy angry songs I’d previously found overwrought. I replayed things Robby said about me over and over, looping on them until I felt like I’d been doing drugs. I knew from my psychoanalytical experiences that this could be something real, yet I violently feared Robby was a womanizer so much that I stopped noticing to see if he was actually, telling myself maybe it was all in good fun, that it was just going to end up as it always does, where I am the one who cares, I am the one who wants. Never mind what he wants, I want to not want.

But my analyst lens kept slipping off without my consent, like a sock that keeps wandering off your heel as you try to hurry down the street trying to ignore that you need to fix that. I realized it was because Robby could see through me. That as I was used to gazing at the world with a wayward glance, he was gazing back. Externally I prob seemed like my life went on just fine, with no remarkable signs anything remarkable had happened. No stirrings, no tweets - nothing. I’m a girl boss I’m doing my jobs etc. to be a *citoyen* of the future. Right?

Ripple in still water
When there is no pebble tossed
Nor wind to blow

I concluded that my fixation on Robby was because Robby could allow himself to see himself in the context of others in a way I’d disavowed - of course in my mind that came as a cost, but Robby paid it well by being discerning with his energy. I figured knowing this would help me be less infatuated. Concluding this just made me yearn more.

Robby was once talking casually about an ex - I was listening because I was fascinated by his past, and I was intent on understanding every crevice and detail so I could build a more solid understanding of him. Immediately, he sharply pivoted the attention to be on me - accusing me of finding myself replaceable, which of course is kinda true, but I wasn’t really sure why that was relevant to him explaining basic facts to me. He then once told me that he himself had been preoccupied about not being the right archetype for a woman, and didn’t want me to feel the same. I found myself frozen, talking very hollowly, unable suddenly to feel. Externally I tried to comfort him by moralizing about how fucked up his exes were for comparing him to their ‘actual ideal,’ a safe move for a woman of my esteem. This led me into a memory hole where I suddenly ceased to understand what was going on.

Reach out your hand if your cup be empty
If your cup is full may it be again
Let it be known there is a fountain
That was not made by the hands of men

I do wonder if I made the grave mistake of not noticing that perhaps what Robby wanted from me was for me to confess that he was the only person who embodied the archetype I now knew I was looking for, and had been looking for for years. which was the one who sees and is pure enough to do that while continuing to look. The wound of cowardice— even my own— is one most people won’t look at, but Robby will. Robby won’t stop looking, he believes it’s his birthright, and fuck it made me want to look too, a thing I’d stopped letting myself do — looking at what was actually there instead of the story I’d built above it. I once said when I feel the sting while looking at someone, that’s when I know the imago is there, but imagine not feeling any sting because the imago is so large in front of you, sharpened by a solid gaze behind it, that you cease to even exist in front of it. This dissolution was the most terrifyingly intimate thing I’d experienced. Every clue I’d ever hidden inside the Real Crystal, exposed.

There is a road, no simple highway
Between the dawn and the dark of night
And if you go no one may follow
That path is for your steps alone

Unfortunately, I was too tongue tied to process anything, too obsessed with preserving my own self image. I just felt overwhelmed as if something bad were about to happen to me, like I’d be punished for letting myself believe him, but soon after I realized the tears welling up were perhaps tears of recognition, as opposed to the misrecognition I feared I was having.

Ripple in still water
When there is no pebble tossed
Nor wind to blow

April 2026

I walk to the water by FiDi. There’s no one here. Actually there are so many people here. No one is looking at me. No one can see me. I stare out for a minute at it all, then glance at what my iPhone shuffle has to show me today.