Afterimage

Nova Sinclair, on the inside of the sleeve.

an afterimage is the thing your eye keeps showing you after you have already looked away. it is not a memory. you do not choose it and you cannot decide when it stops.

I did not write these songs to work anything out. by the time I started them there was nothing left to work out — he was gone, the apartment was the same apartment, and my body had simply not been told. I kept turning toward the hallway when I heard keys on the stairs. I made two coffees for about a month. that gap, between a thing being over and a person noticing, is the whole record, and it is the only subject I had that year.

I am not going to tell you why it ended. I do not think I know, and I have noticed that the songs where I pretended to know were the worst ones. they are not on here.

they are not in order. track four happens before track three — we were still in that bed, still not touching, and I put it after the song where the bed is empty because that is where it actually sits in my head. you do not remember a person from the start. you remember whichever part is loudest, and it is never the part where you were happy.

the last one is the only one that opens. I wrote it in the car at sunrise with the windows down for the first time in months, and I want to be clear that nothing had been resolved. I had not forgiven anybody or understood anything. the air was just lighter. sometimes that is all it is, and I have stopped apologising for how small that sounds.

— n.s., 2023