1991: Loveless, My Bloody Valentine

By Sanjana Bijlani

The heat of shame is impossible to distinguish from the heat of love. I am a tired apprentice to the warmth that grows in the center of my chest when I am forced to bear unsolicited advice. I will myself to breathe before the initial prickle swells. I spare myself the silent question––care or cruelty?––the weighing of intent against impact, the same conclusion that waits until I am alone to reluctantly confront the radiant pain of unpetaling who loves me and who wishes me to disappear.

In the moment of the transgression, I smile. When strangers, coworkers, cousins sharpen their curiosity into a weapon, I nod to encourage them to dig in. I never say no. I accept responsibility for my choices and the universe’s. Yes, I haven’t frozen my eggs. Yes, I don’t plan to get married. Yes, I prefer my loneliness. Yes, I prefer to listen. Yes, it really is time for me to head out. 

My mouth sprouts an unruly bouquet of faults I was meant to weed out sometime between the ages of five and 30. Instead, I spit them into my fists, clench them at my sides. The silence of holding myself together grows to a pitch that can only be felt within. My attempts to warble a liminal understanding of self and place as a late bloomer to unbelonging, to nation or kin, usually end with me unraveling in the nearest enclosure with a lock. 

The night I seek the company of My Bloody Valentine’s second album, I refuse the cool tile of the bathroom floor to sway in the kitchen. Saturday nights unfold unpeopled by intimacy. Music from the wedding venue down the road introduces the aural atmosphere of loss Loveless charges to fill out. Absence presents an expanse to finger the wound, retrace the edges of humanity, the boundary between loneliness and lovelessness.  The album’s title is a dare: How far can I stretch feeling? How much can I bear to tighten the knot of heat in my chest and muffle any attempt at self-soothing?

I am decades late to the album’s arrival, but I am ready to submit to the opening confrontation of snare and guitar that begins “Only Shallow.” The layers of noise grate against my ears as sound and feeling crash into each other, submerging the softness in Bilinda Butcher’s lyrics before I can try to hold on to them for some grounding. The intention is disorientation. Feeling precedes meaning and I let it. The distorted crush of sound doesn’t distance me from the shame of wanting what I want. Sound wedges the heat in further, sharpens the lump in my throat that grows as I listen. I try not to name it, but the pressure is undeniable. 

Loveless isn’t meant to be gentle. It is a space to embody the absence of love. To grit my teeth at tired jokes about my skin, just as pimple-riddled and brown as the teenage immigrant I will always be. Scared of being asked some variation of “Do you know where the terrorists are?” for as long as I live. A thin mist of grief in my eyes as I breathe into the incoherence dispensed in the middle of the night standing alone at a bus stop: “What are you?” 

The reluctant duet that “Touched” offers, alternating between yearning and resistance to it, is a smudged mirror. I latch on to the lack of lyrics, the spiral of strings illegible to any external interpretation other than deep feeling. I give in to the refusal to be understood. I admit the wish for a beloved’s hand to reach for mine when my body is fixed by a glint, a glare, a grin, a stranger’s face ready for a fight.

Before I can revisit the image of the coworker’s pixelated face on Zoom, cornering me one last time before I quit to find out if I am queer, a sweet careen begins “To Here Knows When.” In the repetition of reverb, I don’t pretend to understand the indecipherable distance between time and space, loved and unlovable, the sister states of being I inhabit. I follow the example of incoherence that the album embraces with surprising tenderness. 

I stop trying to reach for language to orient the wayward compass of queer diaspora. I allow my body to absorb the loss of wanting to be loved, the flights of sound that don’t lead anywhere but make the room feel a little less lonely. I sway so the child in me knows that I’m not going anywhere, I’m in it for the long haul. I celebrate unbelonging. The quiet gratitude of being late to the party, but right on time for this one. I sway despite the unmistakable ache of white desire that lives in the album’s lyrics. 

“When You Sleep” drills down on lost moments to conjure nostalgia that makes no home for me in its imagery: “Once in a while / When you make me smile / And you turn your long blonde hair.” The monochromatic palette of longing returns me to a younger age that I have forced myself to outgrow without abandoning the child in me who longed for love. When return grew impossible to locate geographically, I waited for love that might make me want to stay no matter who I had to become to know the relief of reciprocity.  

Shoegaze strikes me as a fitting name for a genre that requires apprenticing oneself to one’s interiority, to examine our tender complicity, how we hold on to the past but refuse to learn from it, insisting on angst-filled sonicscapes to claim that we are owed what we simply are not. There is a time when the jagged guitar in “Sometimes” edging around Kevin Shields’ lyrics might have seemed an earnest attempt to entreat a lover to reconsider. 

I watched as mix CDs disappeared in the depths of lockers and backpacks. I barely registered my grief as I ran to make it to class before the bell rang. But I could never romanticize the loneliness of later listening to the songs I chose wondering who I could have been for someone to find me at my locker with an offering of their own.

I know now not to waste my sentimentality on the pursuit of belonging. I know how to be careful with my language, my softness, with what words I risk to bridge the distance between stranger and a little less feared. It is laughable to imagine saying to someone: “I don’t know how you could not love me now.” Luckily, Shields also reconsiders by the end of the song to reveal the vulnerability that I, too, have held between my lips, “I don’t know, maybe you could not hurt me now.” 

The relief of Loveless lies in feeling, not following along. Letting go of the illusion that anyone emerges unscathed. Choosing not to internalize blanched vignettes of lovelessness or more pointed ruminations on the state of my sex life. Learning to laugh with my entire body when an elder launches an unforgivable question into the air: “Has anyone ever loved you back?” 

I come to Loveless with a soft smile playing at the corner of my mouth. The heat in my chest subsides to a soft warmth I can soothe without having to name. My own unknowability surfaces at the end of each listening and all I have is my body to move me closer to myself. Each song is an invitation to anchor myself to loss, and I do. 

I squeeze my fingers when a coworker hits a table and safety leaves the room. I weave them together to imagine the freedom of estrangement over the calm I summon when a cousin asks my mother what she would do if I were a lesbian. I administer light pulses under the table at a café sitting across from a friend who once hurt me. When I reach for my hands, I send a silent reminder to myself that I am willing to commit to a life of self-intimacy even at the risk of touching down with unbearable loneliness. Loveless isn’t a sadness that rises to the level of injustice; it just is. I don’t have to fight it.

I don’t listen to the album anymore. The noise that once stunned me into self-recognition now prickles my ears. A warning that if I am not gentler, I will lose my way back to myself. I don’t need to be submerged in songs that weren’t meant for me to tend to my own truth. I don’t need a mirror, just a window. A drive at the end of the day, guitars in “Blown a Wish” entrusting Bilinda Butcher’s lyrics to the wind, to the tufted head of the dandelion that fails to remain intact. 

I follow the dandelion. I lengthen my arm out the window, keep the other steady on the wheel. I dare myself to practice softness. I make a wish, not to outlast it, just to be here. Windswept in the tendriling movements of dispersal, dissolution, distances that are always ongoing. I choose to go on. I choose to accompany myself. I choose to accept that it is impossible to survive the tender depths that live within the body. Loveless asks me to spill what is missing while I am still alive to listen to what hurts.

 Sanjana Bijlani writes with questions of care and accountability. Her writing appears in wildness, The Offing, Cream City Review, and elsewhere.