Charlotte Cornfield - Big Volcano, Small Town

A memory - the kind that's so close to being a dream the edges blur, the kind that floats unmoored from context in your mind, weighed down by tiny bits of detail, just enough. 2010, I think, or maybe '11; summer or almost-summer night, dress but no jacket on, bare arms against the air which in Montreal especially at the beginning or the end of the season is a feeling so good it seems like it should be illegal. Someone's impossibly gigantic house way up Sherbrooke, kinda near my old-old place, someone's house or maybe their girlfriend's. A party, a big one. Half-finished basement, pentagrams and aphorisms on the walls in red paint, giant chest freezer with boys perched atop it passing cigarettes back and forth. Christmas lights, loose dirty rug, people sitting on the floor. Girls from my writing classes in beautiful, effortless, slightly mirrored outfits; girls I always saw in line for the free vegan lunch at school but never talked to, girls who looked like girls I knew but weren't. At some point I lost Mike; at some point I talked to a guy for 15 minutes before realizing we'd gone to the same high school together for 6 years. I felt foggy, I was going to go out for some air. But on my way up I got turned around, walked down the wrong hallway, and opened the door to a bedroom; in there was Charlotte, perched on a bed and holding a guitar, singing this song or another one like it in her perfect voice, a voice I could not describe to you if you paid me, a voice that has only ever belonged to one person in the world. I leaned in the doorway and listened, felt something settle in my chest that I did not know had needed settling. I might have taken a photo, but if I did I could not find it for you now, or tell you what it looked like; where I went after the song ended, when the rest of the night dissolved back into itself. A great relief, now, to have this album in the world, to have these songs to listen to and carry with me; still real, still dreamy, somehow both.

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