“Higher.”

Spotify decided it was time for a throwback and started playing Rihanna’s “Higher.” Immediately, I closed my eyes and started scream-singing. When I first heard this song, a lot closer to when it came out in 2016, I used to do this all the time: Imagine I was singing karaoke somewhere and that there was someone in the crowd who loved me, who I was scream-singing for. 

I love this song because it’s not perfectly done, and something about that makes it so endearing to me. In its messiness, it’s more enjoyable than if the song had been cleaner in its lyrics or in Rihanna’s delivery. She sounds like she’s having fun here. It feels like she’s belting her heart out, but that she isn’t trying to impress you. Rihanna has pop dance songs like “Work” and “Disturbia” that have everything right where they need to be for you to feel, at the end of them, like nothing is missing. She also has lyrically mystical songs like “Stay” (another one I used to belt in my living room) and “Love on the Brain,” which make you feel like she said everything she wanted to say and that this was done in a way that was somehow both emotional and precise. 

“Higher,” though, is emotional and messy. It’s saying, maybe more generally, that I appreciate you, that I am in a better place because of you, that I know I’m not perfect but I still want to hang out with you. Do you want to come over? The lyrics are short and there’s a lot else, maybe, that could’ve been said. “I know I could be more creative,” she sings, “and come up with poetic lines / but I’m turned up upstairs and I love you / is the only thing that’s in my mind.” 

I don’t know, I think as a perfectionist, as someone who is like chronically overdoing it, it’s really refreshing to see work that could’ve had more done to it, but that lives buzzily in a place where some stones are left unturned. As an overthinker, hyper-analyzer and, most crucially, a Scorpio, it took me a long, long time to have the bravery to just be honest about how I felt, to tell someone that yeah, things are complicated, but let’s make them simple for a second, scream-sing our good feeling together. 

When I was single, I was much more likely to keep my cards to my chest unless things were very clearly going to work out. In fact, when I first started dating my partner, when he asked me what I was looking for, even though I wanted to date him exclusively, I mumbled a lot of non-committal cool girl shenanigans until he said, gently, “Okay, but I think I’m looking for a relationship,” to which I promptly confessed, “Okay cool, what a coincidence, me too!” I’ve been with him for three years now, and I tell him I love him so often that I forget how hard it used to be to say it. I forget the days I used to imagine scream-singing this song to someone who loved me but didn’t yet know who that someone would be. I love “Higher” because it seems a lot more ready than I was to try, to say what you want to say, even if you haven’t worked out all the outcomes, all the details. It says, Can we pause for a second—can we think less— can we talk about how much I love you, right now?

Image: ROC NATION