BRENNA COLEMAN / SOFT ANIMAL
Ruby steps into a beam of red light and shreds our ears with frequency. We love her because she’s real, really real, and we can reach out and touch her to prove it. We love her because she’s saying all the things we were almost thinking before she said them first; as if she begins the song writing process by wandering our dream orchards and pocketing the pomegranates. We can practically see the halved and oozing fruit on her altar through a curtain of blue smoke– seeds stolen from us of course, but an exciting trace of ourselves in her apartment nonetheless. We let her have it because she’ll do it better and it’s a lost cause for us anyway.
Ruby is critiquing the aestheticization of suffering in the contemporary americana genre by queering and co-opting it—and she is looking hot while doing it. She and her band launch into a dark and dreamy track with melodic buoyancy and a ton of reverb. Her voice pools in the room like gritty amber honey; thick and full. It puts us to sleep and wakes us up in sectors, our bodies flashing as the music travels through us like a circuit board. We are full of stars. We sing along and glitter comes out where words should be. She is looking into each of our individual sets of eyes and changing something inside of us.
We are aware of her ribcage and what it contains; the power she has to blow the whole room up with a breath too deep. (She doesn’t do this, we breathe with her and she breathes exactly, protecting and endangering us with each rhythm.) We know what Ruby wants. We know that it’s her birthday today and she won’t say a word about it. (She’s a Pisces, if you want her full zodiac chart let us know.) We know that it hasn’t always been easy for her—that her life has been tragic and full of holes and ash. The worst of us have been known to admit, with an inadequate amount of shame, that we’re glad for a lack of intervention that would have changed the course of Ruby’s trajectory. We needed her in just the way we had found her—her grief, a stage, and the vortex she was at the center of.
When the show ends we are emptied of ourselves and the static in our eardrums is so prominent that we can taste it; the tinny flavor of dirt in our mouths.
Lately, something is changing. Ruby is playing with her limits; softening her edges. Her messages become more cryptic, and we know she is getting closer. She is getting burnt out on miserable venues, fryer food and blurry state lines. She opens her phone and sends out some sentences about homesteading and herbalism– followed by a snippet of a Mary Oliver poem:
“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal
of your body love what it loves.”
(We find everything we can on Mary Oliver, and we end up so deep in the internet that we are reading someone’s dissertation about nature and queerness.)
Ruby releases the new tour dates later that spring and by then we are foaming at the mouth. We are literally going feral. We find her message to us between Salt Lake City and Boise. We have to laugh because it’s just so Ruby.
A day after the show in Seattle, Ruby shares a video. In it, she’s saying:
I know there’s no good way to do this so I’m just going to come right out and say it. This tour is going to be our last and final tour. I have truly *sniff* loved every part of this journey with you guys, but I really just need to take a step back from it all. Let's all enjoy these last shows together, okay? I really *sniff* don’t want it to be a sad thing. It’s going to be for the best. I love you so much, see you in Portland tomorrow. Bye.
A tear drips off her cheek and on to her breast, then follows the track down her maroon pendant. What she doesn’t say in the video is that desperately looks forward to putting music behind her, that she feels a little loss every time she plays a set—like she is pulling something made from flesh and fat from within her and passing it around for everyone in the room to gnaw and grope at. That she leaves a set feeling ravaged.
We know this in the same way we know anything else.
*
We find her in the tall yellow grass; the van tipped and spilling on the highway. The too full moon relieved by a tiny laceration allowing the light to leak out excessively. Ruby is alive, her knees in the dirt for a few paces until she finds her feet, and when she does, she keeps walking, farther and farther from the incident.
We are all nerves at first—all jitters and giggles.
When it happens we refrain from meeting her eyes, for fear of whatever recognition might be there. With our gaze somewhere in the grass we say that we know how it feels, that we are just so tired, that every time we play a show it’s like we have pulled something made from flesh and fat from within us and passed it—
Ruby is nodding, and asks if she can take her bra off because it’s too tight. She is wiggling it out from underneath her shirt. Tiny bits of windshield and blood are covering her in confetti. She is saying she always knew it would come to this. That she is ready for the next chapter.
Under the light of the moon, in the vast nothing of hills, she knows this in the same way she knows anything else.
*
Ruby lets us in. It’s different than we expected.
In some ways, we feel farther from her than we’ve ever felt—locked behind muscle and marrow; thick sinew between us.
But we have never known a finer home than that of the cavity of her chest; the perfect pomegranate shaped crater for our gentle meditation.
Brenna Coleman is a queer writer based in Salt Lake City. They are a creative writing student, a real person, a Scorpio, a poet, an unconventional architect, and a fun time when the moon is right. Find them on Instagram @brennakcoleman.