On the Sound Artists I’ve Left Behind
During my twenties, I dated not one, but two, sound artists. If you are wondering what that is, I have to report that I still don’t really know. This was before I even moved to Berlin, so really I have no excuse. I met them both when I lived in Ireland and hoped that their lives as creatives would be exciting and make up for the absence of dopamine in my brain that came from years of vitamin D deficiency while living on the least sunny of all islands.
One of these artists is a nice man that I am still friends with, so I’ll leave him out of this. The other is a self-proclaimed feminist who “did feel really guilty about it” when he dated other people behind my back1.
At the pinnacle of my hotness, I was a groupie at musical events that I can only loosely describe as gigs. After his performances, he’d make his way through the crowd, discussing musical theory and the importance of what he was doing in the wider world. Eventually, he’d reach my seat in the audience, gracing me with his presence only after most of the other guests had left (these really weren’t the after party sort of events). He always spoke to me in such a way that a casual onlooker (or quite likely one of the other women he was dating) might assume that I was the world’s biggest fan of disjointed, slightly musical spoken word, rather than his girlfriend of seven months. I use the phrase “spoken word” not to refer to what is an often profound genre of poetry, but to allude to the fact that he was, it has to be said, saying words out loud sometimes slightly in time with some music or, more often, noise. My friends have since asked for reparations for making them attend these shows with me.
When I had to move back to the U.S. for the better part of a year, we kept things going over the distance. During this time, I had a breast cancer scare. I debated telling him about it, because I didn’t want him to worry. When, out of the fear and panic that was consuming me, I did tell him, he did not react. At all. I thought maybe he hadn’t heard me. This was, admittedly, unlikely, as I broke the news via a text message. I kept bringing up in different ways over the next few days, hoping to spark some kind of response. When I finally asked why he wasn’t reacting to this news, he said that I just seemed so worried about it, and he didn’t want to make me more worried by saying something. What annoys me the most when I think back on this is that if I had developed cancer, I know he’d have made a lot of art about it.
Long after this sound creator and I had broken up, I was on a date in Berlin with a former-squatter2 who said that, due to the necessity of appealing to funders and wealthy patrons, working artists become some of the most egregious participants of the capitalist system that you can find. I don’t want to believe this. I want to believe in the expansive and transformative power of art. But, on darker days, I think back to that artist, who wore his feminism as part of his brand and treated me like a commodity, and wonder if that’s true.
1This was despite me telling him to just let me know if he wanted to date other people while I was back in the U.S. When I asked why he didn’t talk to me about when he felt the distance became too hard and wanted to date other people he said he just “didn’t want to ruin things.”
2At the time I knew him, this former squatter lived in a building purchased by a collective of former squatters. These reluctant landlords then charge really low rent, just enough to cover expenses but not to make a profit. This is a relatively common practice in Berlin, the idea being that the principles of affordable and collective housing can be maintained with the legal security of owning the property. This is contingent upon keeping all bedrooms occupied. When his flatmate moved out, my date did not fill the room and took the opportunity to enjoy solo living in a prime location for an incredibly low price.
Laney Lenox is a chronically ill and autistic writer and researcher from Louisiana living in Berlin. She has a PhD in anarchist theory, anthropology, and memory studies. She was a Salvation South editor’s pick in 2024 for her essay “A Stranger Goes on a Journey”, which explored memory culture and white complicity in the American South and Germany. She is a Best Small Fictions 2026 nominee. Writing featured in Maudlin House, Genrepunk Magazine, Burningword Literary Journal, Exacting Clam and elsewhere. Follow on social media: Bluesky, Substack, Instagram @laneylenox