Artwork by Quincy Bui
It breaks my heart that she showed her haters that they hurt her. She’s too precious and shouldn’t have given them a molecule of proof of how they hurt her.
This comment under FKA twigs’ transcendent music video for her 2019 song cellophane frustrates me deeply. This is partly due to the infantilizing impulse to designate twigs as “too precious” to reveal the presence of cutting wounds in her music. This is also due to my agitation with a culture that deems the externalization of pain as proof of personal failure, as if recovering neatly in isolation is a superior way to heal from heartbreak.
My heart has broken with the loss of long-term relationships, short-term affairs, and meaningful friendships. In the throes of emotional laceration, I am debilitated. I try to articulate my all-consuming grief through writing, yet no words can convey the urgency of my pain in the midst of it. I try to immerse myself in daily life, but I no longer know how to function as a person without the one who’s gone. Seeking solace in the sympathy of community is necessary and important, but the knowledge that friends cannot feel the intensity of my suffering pierces every interaction. In the throes of emotional laceration, I feel like a pariah. I observe others taking the metro, shopping for groceries, submitting class assignments; and I am dumbfounded by how anyone carries on with their lives like nothing happened, as if the universe itself hasn’t been eviscerated.
Time and time again, I have found that the best way to mend a broken heart is to yield to the agony. The raw torment of a freshly splintered heart should be cleaved further open and suffused with shards of hearts shattered before. It is through imbuing music and film and novels and poetry with the particularities of one’s present heartbreak that its intensity is felt fully, and it is only once heartbreak is fully felt that mending slowly begins.
I opened by quoting a comment under cellophane, the lead single from twigs’ 2019 album MAGDALENE. The comment references a commonly speculated narrative behind the lyrics: twigs’ breakup with Robert Pattinson, surmised to be spurred on by Pattinson’s failure to defend twigs from racist attacks that his fans were hurling at her. While this interpretation offers an intriguing lens through which to listen to both cellophane and the entire album, I believe that exclusively engaging with a song or an album solely through the theorized backstory is a detrimental choice.
An artwork’s meaning shifts depending on the person engaging with it, and changes depending on the surrounding circumstances of that particular engagement. My experience with cellophane is unique and unreplicable, just as twigs’ experience recording and performing cellophane is unique and unreplicable, just as your experience listening to the song is unique and unreplicable. Engagement with an artwork should be both a transformative and transforming experience, which is why I am baffled by the commenter’s choice to belittle cellophane to a superficial admission of defeat.
In the outro for cellophane, twigs sings: “They’re waiting / They’re watching / They’re watching us / They’re hating / They’re waiting / And hoping / I’m not enough.” It is true that us non-famous individuals do not have a mob of racist Twilight fans praying for the downfall of our relationships. But we find ourselves in an artwork’s details—the more specific a text, the more universal it becomes. We all center ourselves in our own love stories. The feeling of not being enough for an ex-partner, the fear that others notice our inadequacy compared to the ones we love, is an experience that permeates ordinary life.
And that desperate plea of the chorus, cried out with immense power broken by emotion: “Didn’t I do it for you? / Why don’t I do it for you? / Why won’t you do it for me? / When all I do is for you?” It would be an injustice to FKA twigs, and to ourselves to not hold still and allow those words to submerge us completely.
It is part of human nature to process our lives through narratives. It is easier to form stories about our suffering rather than feel it. Yet in the case of heartbreak, it is immersion into that deep torment that grants us eventual reprieve. Of course, I have indulged in reading Reddit threads speculating about the dissolution of FKA twigs and Robert Pattinson’s relationship, nitpicked the timeline of Pattinson’s subsequent relationship with Suki Waterhouse, and analyzed every lyric of MAGDALENE through the lens of such gossip. This activity is exciting, sparks empathy, and is harmless when practiced in our private lives. But it is when I abandon interpretation and surrender to pure sensation that I experience twigs’ music in its utter sublimity. In times of heartbreak, when we are at our most raw, suspending interpretation is absolutely necessary.
There is no ultimate meaning to our pain. There is no concise narrative to how our relationships crash and burn. Analysis becomes a shield against affect; in heartbreak, our job is to yield to pure sensation. In the throes of emotional laceration, we must drown our bleeding hearts in a concoction of art created by hearts that bled before. To seek works that rip apart our organs, grasp our bloody corpses with their equally bloody essence, and hold our hands tight as we gradually step back into the world.
This is what cellophane has done for me. See what cellophane can do for you.
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