Natasha Khan in a Box

There’s that moment in the middle of a concert where you stop thinking about yourself entirely. It happened somewhere in the middle of Bat for Lashes’ set at Fritz Club last night, when I realized that Natasha Khan—all five feet of her, moving across the stage like someone conducting a séance—had managed to make me feel like I was the only person in the room. Not in a flattering way. In a way that made me understand why people do stupid things. Why they write letters they never send. Why they imagine scenarios that would definitely be crimes.

I want to put her in a glass box. A beautiful, magical, terrarium-like thing with blue light and moss and nothing but her voice. Just her, performing, singing Daniel on a loop, never aging, never leaving, never realizing that the person pressing his face against the glass is no longer quite sane. My friend Sarah, who’d spent forty euros on a hoodie she immediately regretted, rolled her eyes at me during one of my incoherent declarations of worship. She was right to roll her eyes. I deserved it.

The band is tighter than I expected. Khan has this stillness to her—she barely moves, but the whole room moves around her. That’s genuine power. Not the fake kind you see in music venues where everyone’s trying to seem larger than they are. She’s just there, being impossibly magnetic, and you can feel everyone in the room mentally buying tickets to her next show.

There were celebrities there—the kind of minor famous people you recognize from television, the kind that make you aware you’re at an event rather than just a show. But I wasn’t interested. I was too busy mentally furnishing my glass box.

Bat for Lashes has been around for long enough that people stopped talking about them the way they used to, which means the people still showing up actually care. And Natasha Khan just turned thirty, which somehow makes her more captivating instead of less. You’d think that’s not how it works. But it is.

I don’t know what I’m going to do about any of this. I’ll probably just listen to Two Suns again and let that feeling sit in my chest until it becomes a regular ache, the kind you stop noticing. The kind that shapes you without you realizing. That’s the thing about obsession with someone you’ll never have—it’s not about the person at all. It’s about what the obsession teaches you about yourself. Mine’s teaching me that I’m still as dumb about beauty as I was at twenty-five.