2. Listening Rituals

This is the first entry in Listening Rituals, a series devoted to the practice of tracing ourselves through music.

This week, my essay on Lightning Bug's gorgeous 2021 album, A Color of the Sky, and the way some friendships hold up a mirror to who we’ve been and who we’re becoming.

Last month, I flew to Cleveland with my friend Anna for the long July 4th weekend to visit our old friend Em—one of those friendships that feels stitched into the fabric of who I am. I met them both when I was eighteen, still dazed from the move to Boulder, wide-eyed and hungry for a different kind of life. I lit my first cigarette with Anna in the garage at the house on Table Mesa, wrote strange poems in workshops with Em before I even knew what I was trying to say. We worked at the campus radio station together and found the kind of music that cracked something open in us. And on many nights, we danced into oblivion at the radio’s dance parties…nights that seemed to shield a future that felt so big, so unknown.

On the night of the Fourth, at dusk, along a path that skirted Lake Erie, I saw fireflies (or, as some call them, lightning bugs) for the first time in my life. All these little bursts of gold hovering among the grasses in the darkening, humid Ohio air, almost beckoning us forward. “Look! Fireflies!” I felt like a kid, full of awe, wondering how I had never seen these beautiful creatures before. 

Later, that same night, I saw them again when Anna and I went outside to smoke. I stood out in the yard of Em’s beautiful Tudor revival house, and I kept watching them flicker in and out of sight, like magic, strange little messengers trying to tell me something, as though speaking a different language, inscrutable and ancient. It didn’t feel like seeing them so much as being met by them. Like a spell had been activated, or as though something I didn’t know I’d been missing had returned.

I stood, hypnotized. Fireworks bloomed above the treetops.

I felt much the same way when I first heard Lightning Bug a few years ago, which is why I decided to make this the first post for my Listening Rituals series. There are times when you hear a song or an album, and you can feel a shift inside yourself at a cellular level. That’s what Listening Rituals celebrates: those moments when music leads you to a fundamental realization, maybe in who you are, who you or were, or who you long to be. Those moments are sacred, in my eyes, and become bookends to our most intimate experiences. A Color of the Sky, by Lightning Bug, is one such album for me.

I first heard A Color of the Sky at a time when some rituals in my life were as strong as ever, some were quickly fading away, and others were surfacing anew.

I had just moved into a new apartment in 2021, I was still sober, and I had just gotten my first deck of Tarot cards. I was pulling cards and setting intentions during new moons, trying to find parallels between my life and in the images of the Rider-Waite set. I was also dating again, meeting up with guys from Hinge, hoping to find a partner I could see myself marrying one day. After six years of sobriety, I eventually decided to drink again later that same year, wondering if this time it was from a place of choice or from succumbing to the social pressures of dating. I knew that the work I had done during my years of sobriety had healed me in many of the ways I had hoped, but I also knew I still felt so fragile and raw, as though the slightest misstep would break me. Still, I felt more content with my life than I had in a long time.

Lightning Bug’s “Song of the Bell” details a similar uncertain space of reformation:

"If I empty me of all myself, am I a vessel or a shell? / Mining for substance in the dark and precious well / Pour out my convictions till I'm hollow as a bell / If I empty me of all myself, am I a vessel or a shell?" - Audrey Kang

Singer Audrey Kang has noted in interviews that she wrote the song during early quarantine—days suddenly hollowed out for many of us—and she was thinking through Taoist ideas around emptiness, asking: can one empty oneself and remain whole, to be vessel not shell? 

I suppose it’s a question that resonates looking back on the past decade of my life. Was I a shell, pushing away the people who played such a big part of my adolescence and early adulthood as I became more hollowed from addiction, or was I a vessel all those years, holding space for the experiences that would lead me back to those very people, ready and open to share my revelations from some liminal, fragile space? "If I empty me of all myself..."

The words felt less philosophical question than lived fracture. I thought of all the years when I felt hollowed—grief, doubt, dislocation. But I thought too of the unexpected fullness in being reseen. I was a vessel, emptied and made whole at once.

So much in my life was changing in 2021, but this album was the one constant that year. I was in awe from the first bits of percussion and guitar that open the album until the very end, Audrey Kang’s airy voice threading it all together.

"When the light of day decays… I lie awake / And in the night I see / all the people that I used to be...All the friends I failed, or lost / or left behind of me / And all the things I didn’t mean to break / I lie awake" - Audrey Kang

"I Lie Awake" is a song that creates a stillness, a reminder that all versions of us, bright and broken, linger in view, urging us to trust what remains even as it shifts. 

That weekend, as Anna and I caught up with Em and her husband, Dan, I felt a kind of homecoming I hadn’t realized I’d been needing. The good kind, the kind where you don’t have to explain yourself from scratch, because you’re with friends who have known you before you’ve shed so many skins yet calloused so many others. 

Over the years, our friendship has held its own rhythm of distance and return. I remembered versions of myself I thought I’d lost. And not in a nostalgic way exactly, but in the way you recognize the shape of something even after it’s changed. I was tracing the outlines of a life that I thought was long gone, only it was always there, flickering, like those tiny, magical creatures glowing in the thick of the Cleveland night air that weekend. The ache of past selves, past choices...somehow it all felt right in the context of us spending time together after all these years.

The entire trip to Cleveland made me think of the kind of friendships that vanish and reappear, gaps in time closed in a single sentence, flickering like sparks from a fire. You blink, and they’re gone. You blink again, and you’re back on a couch in Boulder, laughing like nothing changed at all; blink, and you're in your mid-thirties together, at the dinner table, laughing at the dumb shit you used to do when nothing and everything seemed to matter all at once. Just like old friends do: you lose touch, move across states, change through your own seasons of life, and hopefully, if you're lucky, have the chance to share it all years later, old and new versions of yourself combined, on full display.

It’s the weight of these realizations and more questions that entered me when I left Cleveland:

Is continuity (of the self, of relationships) only meaningful if there’s room to hold new light, room to be witnessed by each other? What stories do we tell our loved ones (and which do we choose not to tell), especially after years have passed, and is that kind of storytelling truly the only way to become whole again, to integrate all versions of the self, past and present?

Sometimes, it takes being witnessed by people who knew you before everything broke to feel balanced. In my unspooling, a years-long unspooling, years that made me question everything, it took being witnessed by two old friends again to remember there was something whole underneath it all. To realize that I don't have to bear a cross of guilt and regret over past choices, because these are people who have always accepted me, even as those choices seemed to make me flicker in and out of view. Time…it stretches, collapses, rewinds. I kept thinking how rare it is to sit beside someone who remembers the earliest drafts of me. I think of Cleveland, and I think of that Fourth of July weekend as a vessel, maybe even a portal, to parts of myself that were for so long dormant, now awake.

The other night, at home, I went out to the backyard for a cigarette. I listened to the whole Lightning Bug album again, in awe of its quiet beauty.

“All the people that I used to be,” Kang sings. Old selves that I’d forgotten… decisions I didn’t expect to survive… friendships I thought had ended. But here—in the dark, seeing those fragments—it felt like remembrance rather than regret.

I listened, letting the songs become a mirror and a balm. 

Maybe that’s what listening to music is, at its best. Not just taking in sound—but letting it call back the parts of us that we thought had drifted beyond reach. Noticing which selves rise to the surface. Which memories flicker back to life, soft and shy as fireflies.