Sebastian has long hair and a long beard he cannot be the one holding the pot. I was like, “David has brown skin, so he cannot be the one holding the pot. We got pulled over, and Sebastian was smoking from an apple in the back, and I kicked into control mode. We almost got arrested for weed possession. Sebastian said that when we were in Marfa, Texas. ![]() On the line, “Sebastian said, ‘I’m a good man in a storm’”: It’s awful how many memories I have with having a friend be with me and then having a more popular girl say to that friend, “Okay, you can be friends with Fiona or you can be friends with me. Mainly because that’s where my relationship to women started getting fucked up. My middle-school experience is still so important to me. But I think about that little picture of her. I’m terrified to think - what if she’s not a nice person nowadays? Or maybe she hates me or something. They used me.” I was like, This little kid realized what the fuck was going on. She was like, “They used me to bring the people in there, to think it was cute. And everybody was laughing because she was so cute and she messed up words or something. It’s all about how she got put up to do this thing in church, in the service. But on the piece of paper that Miss Kunhardt sent me, there’s this short essay Shameika had written on the top. She’s just got this big smile on her face. Then I got sent this picture of her, and she’s so cute - she doesn’t look like a bully at all. But I had remembered that maybe she was a bully or something. Shameika came up, and she was like, “Why are you trying to sit with those girls? You have potential.” That was all she said to me. So I sat one seat away but still tried to be close to them. I came over to sit with them, and they started laughing at me. I just remember being in the cafeteria, a bunch of girls at one end of the table. I don’t remember why she was talking to me. I can see her …” She sent me a picture of her. She read the New Yorker article, and the next day, she sent me an email saying, “I heard you wrote about Shameika. I’ve kept in touch with her over the years. My third-grade teacher, Linda Kunhardt, was my favorite teacher. Because I have this one memory and it’s a very big memory for me. When I first wrote the song, I was not entirely convinced she existed. ![]() Just knowing, “Okay, no matter what happens, that’s where home is. But I felt there was this understanding between us. I walked down the hill, and there were these horses that never paid attention to me. I left the meditation hall, and it was still happening. But I opened my eyes and it was still happening. I felt like if I opened my eyes, maybe it would disappear. I felt like I had found it and everything felt so beautiful. It was like this place of home, this pulse we would all be in. It was something we were all in together. But it wasn’t in my head it was out of it. And we all share it, and it sounds so cheesy. I’d never had an experience like that, and it’s hard for me to remember what it felt like now, but it’s the biggest thing that’s ever happened to me in my life. But then everybody was throbbing - everything. And for some reason, I was able to do that, and the throbbing in my head left. ![]() Then I remembered this advice someone had given me, which was to just surrender - allow yourself to fall through water, stop trying to do anything. The line about the pulse - that was the experience I’d had this one day after six days straight of meditating at Spirit Rock in Woodacre, California, in a group of about 75 women in 2010. These things about me are true whether or not you acknowledge them. That whole thing of, “If a tree falls in the forest and no one’s around to hear it, does it make a sound?” Yes, it does. It came out of the time I’d spent doing a lot of meditation, thinking about the nature of things. The songs change who they’re about a lot. Then we broke up about a year later, so it wasn’t about him anymore. Then I got back together with Jonathan in 2015, and it became about him for a while. This started as a love song to somebody I hadn’t met yet.
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