i wasn't there

the first chart with my name on it came from a country i left. and i'm still working out what that means.

i found out my song charted in israel while standing in my kitchen in queens, holding a coffee i’d already let go cold.

a friend sent a screenshot. top songs israel, june 26, and somewhere on the list, low tide. number fifteen. highest new entry. i read it three times. then i looked up and i was still in astoria, on an ordinary saturday, fairy wanting breakfast. no one knew yet but me. it was the biggest thing that had happened to me in three years and it fit inside a phone.

i moved here in 2016. i came to make it in america, and i have spent almost ten years on that one sentence, on visas and apartments and trains and stages and bars full of people who’d never heard of me. the whole project was here. so i don’t fully know what to do with the fact that the first real sign, the first time a chart had my name on it in a few years, came from the place i left.

i want to be careful not to turn this into a homesick song. i wasn’t homesick, exactly. i made a choice, and i’d make it again. but there’s something specific about people in the country you grew up in deciding, on their own, to play a song enough that it lands on a chart. people i don’t know, in a language i stopped writing songs in, in a place i can’t always get back to as easily as i’d like.

and i found out by screenshot. not in person, not from someone’s face. a friend sent a picture of a phone. that’s how most news from home reaches me now, secondhand, a few hours ahead of me. it was already afternoon there. it was still morning here. i was hours behind my own news.

i used to think making it here would answer the question of where i belong. it didn't. if anything the chart made the questions louder. for one morning i was on a list in israel and standing in queens and not really in either place, somewhere in the six thousand miles between the song and the people playing it.

here’s the part i keep turning over. it didn't make me feel claimed. it made me feel the distance more exactly than i had in years. you can go a long time without measuring how far away you are. then you see your name on a list in another country and you can’t stop counting the miles.

i posted the screenshot. i wrote one word over it, home, and i still couldn’t tell you which home i meant. the country, or the kitchen, or the song, or just the plain fact of being heard again after being quiet for so long.

then i fed fairy. i made another coffee. a few thousand people i haven’t yet met were listening to something i made in a small apartment a long way from them, and i didn’t book a flight, i didn’t do anything. i stayed where i am. which is, i think, the most honest answer i have to where home is right now.

more soon. snir