When I started the divorce process, I thought I would start to notice love songs because of the loss of that love in my life. Turns out there are more than enough songs about the crumbling process and aftermath of a broken relationship, and those resonate with me far more than songs about what I've lost. This seems terribly obvious to me now and probably is to most people, but it took me a bit by surprise because I can be rather dense at times.
I just spent the better part of an evening having a delicious Italian meal and finishing with a coffee at a local shop with my Kindle to keep me company when I wasn't people-watching and/or surreptitiously eavesdropping. Normally, I enjoy these situations for the freedoms and possibilities they entertain, but tonight, there was a bit of an edge to the evening. There was a small festival going on in the area, so the crowds were much younger and rowdier than normal. But even past that, I found myself unable to enjoy a simple stroll down the sidewalk as I had many times before, and even now as I sit here, I'm still not sure why.
My best guesses are a relative unfamiliarity with the situation (since I rarely visited the area at night while married due to my wife's general social anxiety and aversion to drunk people) and a marked feeling of being out of place in terms of age. Granted, the evening's event likely dropped the mean age of attendants markedly, but I walked those streets tonight as an outsider, one whom I might have mocked ten years ago for being in the no-man's-land between young adulthood and middle age. Of course, the divorce probably had an influence as well since the abandonment of a spouse is significant enough to cause even the most confident person to question his or her value.
As I started home, I put on Passenger, as I am often have recently. I'd heard a track earlier in the day and wanted to hear it again, but was content to simply queue the album and let the song come on in due time. As I drove home, several songs played, and I actually had to skip as I got closer to make sure the song came up. Its name is Bloodstains, and many parts of it are sharply accurate to my current situation. However, It was the track after that which was involved in my "movie moment."
Most of the way home, I turned onto a highway from a stoplight and got the semi-random urge to push my car a bit and hear the engine work. I got up to speed quickly, but far from the smile which usually follows such a trot, the song playing launched into a chorus of a guy asking his partner to lie to him, seemingly choosing a flawed relationship over the pain of the breakup and/or the loneliness which follows. It made me reflect on the last several months of my marriage and how my wife and I had done the same thing on some level, maybe not listening to the honestly of the other person, just hearing what we wanted to hear to hold onto some hope of delaying what had, at some point, become inevitable.
As I heard this, I glance up through my sunroof and saw the half-moon glowing, enclosed in the halo of dense humidity. The cool spring air was running through the car, and there were no vehicles around me on the road, leading to a sense of isolation. It suddenly struck me that if someone were making a movie about my situation, this would be a scene: slow panning shots of the interior of the vehicle, cutaways to the moon, accompanying shots of my wife accidentally pulling up a picture of me on her phone, this song playing over it all. It felt odd and a little dream-like, imagining the third-person view of the whole thing, and it brought an oddly serene feeling to an otherwise jarring evening.
I thought the songmaker should be lauded for creating a piece which spoke so specifically to me, and then realized that in order for this to be the case, my situation and feelings must be so widely experienced as to allow a song to be made of them. That didn't really help my mood; I think everyone likes to think of their experiences as somehow unique or special, but the truth is mankind has been falling in and out of love for a long time, and the general feelings are pretty universal. I guess that's a good thing since it allows others to comfort us and empathize with us in times of pain, even if they're musicians we've never met.
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