Luthier: A Story About Loss

First it was the guitar he left behind in my apartment that was demolished. I had been staring at it every time a call or text to him went unanswered, and it was my phone that was the first object to make a dent in the soft wood of the body. I ran my finger over that initial wound, and realized: I can’t hurt him, so I’ll hurt this instead. I’ll cut you up, I’ll rip you to shreds and I’ll carry the pieces with me until I find a fire big enough to burn you to ash in seconds alone. I had never had an attachment to guitars; my heart belonged mostly to words on paper, and sometimes to the piano my parents gave me for my sixteenth birthday. I had asked for a car.

When it was obvious that he was not coming back to me, I carefully laid the already bruised guitar on my floor and proceeded to jump on it over and over again. In my Kelly-green heels, I smashed it to bits. With each downward fall against the neck, I slipped on the nylon strings and all but screamed: Take that! Do you hear me? Take that, I said! Yeah Yeah Yeahs were blaring out of the speakers.

I sat on my bed and looked at the mess I had made: the slivers of wood, the strings that were once so straight now coiled and pointing up and out in all directions, and the perfect circular hole that once echoed with sound and complimented his out-of-tune voice, was now jagged and misshapen. I let the guitar sit on my floor for over a week. When he came for the rest of his belongings, the ones I couldn’t break, I slid his broken guitar under my bed. I told him I smashed it and had thrown it out. I didn’t tell him I was waiting to burn it; he wouldn’t understand.

After a week of stepping over it, kicking it aside, throwing anything within arm’s reach at it, I took it outside to the garbage cans that lined the front of my building. It’s hard to find a bonfire in New York City. I shoved the pieces in one of the black trash bags just as two girls walked by: “Oooh! Someone must have been mad!” said the shorter one.

“Girl, why you gone do that?” asked the taller one in a hot pink scarf that extended far past her full hips.

“I used to be a rockstar,” I said. I pushed the pieces as far down as I could; I watched them pierce the thin plastic of the bag and felt mildly vindicated. I placed the cover back on the can and went upstairs. Bon Iver was blaring out of the speakers.

There were those who agreed with my actions, those who had wished it had been him instead, and the few who questioned if I had taken my meds the day of the attack. It wasn’t about medicine at that point; it was about loss. It was when the tears had begun to cease and my breathing was less strained that I decided to make amends the only way I knew how: I bought him a new guitar.

I could not afford an expensive one, nor was I steeped in any sort of knowledge in the difference between guitars outside of acoustic versus electric. Electric would have been harder to crush. I spent days comparing brands, researching types that might be an exact match to his, so he’d never know the difference and I could at least fake the resemblance of sanity. I had his new guitar messengered to his office the day before I left for Colorado. Jesper Norda was blaring from my computer at work.

***

“This guitar sounds like you singing,” was the text I received one night. I had been back in New York City for three days. I had walked up Driggs and over to the Marcy stop. It was December and I shivered with each step up the long staircase to the subway platform. I was sick to my stomach; at dinner everyone had oysters. I do not like oysters. Instead, I had too many martinis. It’s hard for me eat when there’s nothing there.

I had erased his number, but there he was again in my hand, coming through in digital print on my phone. I shivered and waited for the train. I would see him again before the night was over, and the replacement guitar, the one I had carefully researched, the one that broke my small bank account to buy, would be smashed by the both of us.

“I’m an ornament,” was what he had scrawled on its body in black Sharpie. We had decided that we didn’t like the guitar; it sounded like me singing, it was perpetually out of tune, and it had to be destroyed for what it represented. He threw it from the top of the stairs to the main floor of his apartment, and we took turns jumping on it. Again, the thin wood of the body flaked away as if made of Styrofoam, and the strings coiled up and out in all directions. He picked it up by the neck and banged it against the floor over and over again; he only stopped when his roommate came home.

“Great,” said Clifford as he removed his jacket and hung it on one of the hooks by the stairs, “Hurricane Christoffer and Amanda again… just make sure you clean that up when you’re done.” We agreed. Yeah Yeah Yeahs were blaring from his bedroom.

Long ago, my friend Fal left her guitar behind. It was nothing fancy, but based on what guitar players told me, it played well. I had my mother ship it to me, and gave it to him. I still owed him a guitar. He mostly kept it on a stand, as he couldn’t play very well, but just like the first guitar it complimented his off-key, out-of-tune voice; the voice that never got the lyrics right.

When I left for Colorado the second time in less than one calendar year, my friends swooped in and retrieved the guitar from him. He didn’t deserve any tangible memory of me, was the consensus; he didn’t deserve any memory of me at all. It was the sickening thought of the guitar sitting in his room being privy to his careless behavior that forced me to reclaim it. I still couldn’t play it; I had no need to learn how.

Coec went to his office, collected my belongings and placed them in her living room. She leaned the guitar case against her bookshelf, and when I was ready, she promised to return them to me. I promised myself to never be ready.

When it was clear that the ultimatum had been drawn along the ground, and sides had been chosen, Coec asked me to come for my belongings. She couldn’t see me, she didn’t approve and she wanted me to remember how I felt each time he forced me to leave the city, because it would be happening again. I didn’t need a lecture; I didn’t need a lesson.

On Tuesday I went to her apartment building to once again chase down a guitar that was never mine to begin with, to make a possession of something I didn’t even care to possess.

“I’m here to pick up a guitar,” I said to the man in the red and white Santa hat behind the front desk, “My name is Amanda.”

He flipped through a logbook, ran his dirty-nailed finger over black-penned words, and looked up at me. “Ah, yes. Come right this way,” he said. I followed him to the storage room; there it was once again. I picked it up with both arms, unsure as to how one even held a guitar case, and the man laughed: “Looks like you missed it,” he said jovially.

“Yeah, something like that,” I whispered as I balanced the case between my feet to put my mittens back on before going out onto the cold Brooklyn streets. I leaned it forward and grabbed it by the handle; it was heavier than I thought it would be. Just days before Christmas, the crowds were thick and I struggled to weave through them with the clunky black case at my side. Broken Social Scene was blaring on my iPod.

My mother wasn’t sold on the idea of me learning to the play the guitar, or the thought that maybe I could be the next Joan Baez with enough practice, so I started piano lessons at eight-years-old. I thought of this as I walked along with the guitar I had learned to hate. I knew once I got it home, it would again sit in my bedroom until I allowed Christoffer to take it away once more, and months from now when we both said things we will have meant in the moment, I’d stand outside his apartment making a public plea for the guitar back. And it wouldn't be about the instrument at all, or the fact that I still wouldn't be able to play it, or even that it’s not my guitar to give away or reclaim… no, again it would be about loss. It would be about what’s mine isn’t yours and what’s yours will never be mine, it would be about spite, about the drink he spilled by accident months before, the nights I stayed up until dawn scratching at my insides with a black pen and the fact that sometimes importance is misplaced.

I thought of how it felt to pound on the piano keys as a kid, the way it feels to have such power to draw sound from a box of perfectly placed steel strings. Pianos are bulkier than guitars; you cannot wrap them up in a case, close them in with rusted latches, give them away, take them back or leave them behind. Pianos are lucky this way.

On Thursday I took the subway into Brooklyn with the guitar in hand. I got off somewhere in Park Slope, climbed the stairs to the sidewalk up above and leaned the guitar against a random brick building. I did not make an elaborate scene, a teary-eyed farewell; I was simply done. I crossed the street and took the subway back into Manhattan. Matt Pond PA was blaring on my iPod.