Mehreen Karim Wants You to Break Your Heart Open
Why I do pop-ups.
Dear reader,
The following newsletter admits my guilty pleasure of a secret: I actually do pop-ups just to make you listen to my music. And yes, my playlist for Monday Suppers is available below. Now let’s unpack!
We need art to move throughout our emotional bodies, and ultimately, to survive them.
In a recently viral Modern Love podcast bylined “Andrew Garfield Wants You to Break Your Heart Open”, we see Andrew shaken by the grip of love and art. After beginning to read an excerpt of an essay, listeners can hear the weight of his tears and sighs grow heavier with every word he attempts to recite. Eventually pausing the recitation, he collects himself and poises his very reaction as an example of why art, whether it be written, sung, or visualized, is worth paying attention to. After being asked why this passage evoked such a response, Garfield retraces the trajectory of his cries from the depths of his grief, and conjures a wise lesson from it all:
“This is why art is so important. It can get us to places that we can’t get to any other way.”
Andrew, and the countless romantics from centuries past, are all correct. We need art to move throughout our emotional bodies, and ultimately, to survive them. From the lonely age of eight and onwards, I would shut the lights, obstruct my face with a pillow or blanket, and select songs to shuttle myself to a world of fantastical love and life stories that I, at the time, felt I may never live out in reality. I wouldn’t have had the exact words to identify music as a vehicle for emotional travel when I first employed indie-pop songs or anime OSTs to lift me off into uncharted, surrealist territories. But I religiously wrote mental scripts for each emotional pilgrimage I yearned to one day feel in my bones and branded each song with the heart-changing moment it could be the soundtrack of.
Twenty-something years later, I now have the audience (You) and the opportunity (Pop-ups) to infect a room with sounds and lyrics, that ultimately possess you with a momentary trance of escapism too! Us, escaping, together. <3
When I made my rounds through the dining rooms of Huda, watching couples sip and swap their mocktails and girls take turns portraiting one another against their velvet chairs, I heard the songs from my past chime around the restaurant chatter. Success. Even if you didn’t pause to recognize the music, I have faith that a string arrangement or soft chorus from any one song was gently seared into your memory of a dinner where you are enamored by how pretty life can be.
For the playlist behind Monday Suppers, I dusted off classic tunes from the first mix CDs my siblings left in my hand-me-down Honda Civic and perused the songs I’ve cried to ahead of ending serious relationships. Each song on this playlist has, at one point in my life, succeeded in making me feel desired, aglow, or in a delicate, shimmering sorrow.
The very first song on the playlist accomplishes all three criteria at once, and colors Monday Suppers with every shade of romantic I wanted you to taste and feel. The lyrics of After Hours by the Velvet Underground describe elements of a rather perfect evening, and perhaps, the singer’s ability to experience that evening from the solitude of being excluded from said evening, in her own room, in her own world:
If you close the door, the night could last forever
Leave the sunshine out and say hello to never
All the people are dancing, and they're having such fun
I wish it could happen to me
But if you close the door
I'd never have to see the day again.
Like the lyricist, I often relished in daydreams of the bright, love-lit world that existed beyond my own dim, childhood bedroom. However bleak this imagery sounds, I want to assure you that I was okay. I don’t wish I could go back and tell myself about how magical life becomes one day. I don’t think my younger self needed that assurance, because, the miracles I dreamt of kept me company long into the life I adore today. God forbid my younger self ever lost sight of the power of the art that kept her dark room alight, because then, she may never have yearned as deeply, or worked as hard, for the vivid life she lives today. :’)