I’ve been listening to Shirley Horn’s version of “I Want to Be With You”. A lot. When it ends, I’ll play it from the beginning, and again and again until it lifts off the ground. It’s not just the romance of her sultry contralto. It’s really more about time.
In a lovely-tender-blue meditation of my boyfriend’s, he wrote:
I liked to watch you eat with one hand and hold your pen in the other because it looked like the thing to do when you’ve lived for a while and learned things like how to trick time like how to eat with one hand.
Since I read it last year, I’ve been (mostly unconsciously) tracking the ways love tricks time. The way it persists through it (often against our will), the way it halts it, or speeds it up to double, triple time. The way we can get too deep only a few days weeks months in. The way people tap their watches after a few years, once marriage has become the obligatory next step. Even my kneading this phrase over and over in my mind signals a circular return. And the phrase is originally couched in a contemplation of the past.
Enter Ms. Shirley. It’s the lyrics, it’s her inflection of them. The double entendre of the second “be” with you, maybe akin to the biblical “know”.
The song is full of duality in general. “…hating you, and loving you…”
But most relevant to our purposes, it tricks time so deftly— a series of lyrical sleights of hand that volley between not enough of it and a vastness of it.
Tonight I’m touching you
Holding you, you’re gonna see
Tonight could mean future, on first thought. Or present, on second. And the tense, the gerund of touchingholding brings to mind the present too. There’s already a complication there—how can both states exist at once?
This song is full of promises, which can feel so material when articulated aloud. Vows, which are predicated on the present commitment to an illusory future.
She moves even more into the not yet.
We’ll make out somehow
And back to the present,
They can’t hurt us now
Future:
We’re gonna have it all
I’ll love you every day
Conditional:
Baby life could be…so great for us
And then, the clock slows:
Here’s our chance, it’s not too late for us
Then, in a sudden pivot, it races:
Make it now, cause life won’t wait for us
Love is breakneck, love is glacial, it’s steady and arrythmia. It’s a rush, it’s paced and quotidian. Today is a slow Saturday and I could live in it forever.
I wanna be with you.
Recently, I spent half the day with an old beloved, and it discombobulated me in a way I expected. Because feelings resurfaced a little, I guess, but moreso because there was this collision. Of now-selves, and past selves. And there was a sense of coupled tender nostalgia and estrangement. But don’t those two always go together. Doesn’t nostalgia necessitate estrangement, distance. And the feelings, they don’t belong in the present anyway. I was just time traveling.
Love always makes me feel like I have more time than I do, less time than I do. It makes me think about spending forever with him, and also constantly doubt love’s ability to withstand. Why say ‘til death when there is only right now right now? Why not say it, when there is forever right in front of us— stretched out like a swimmer’s thigh across a lap. It seems the only thing to do is lean into the trickery, live into the maelstrom of back and forth. (It isn’t linear anyway, y’all already know how I feel about multiple temporalities.) The fact that I can hold it all— the nostalgia of the past, the thrill of present, the promise of future— is a pleasure and a source of anxiety.
I’ll close with a text message.
“The flute felt so delicate, and the way she plays with tense…it’s a song about a future that has already happened and is happening now, might never happen. And that feels better than making any promise to you…The way the song begins and ends the same way. And it’s such a simple, pulsing thought I have all the time. I want to be with you. I want to be with you.”