Music that makes me feel awful
The past few days I have had some heavy conversations with one of my brothers, I guess. “Heavy…. I guess”, insofar that he actually considers the conversation serious, too. This stuff is hard to gauge, right?
It’s all relative. So, for example, when I talk about the deaths of people I loved dearly, it’s not awkward, because I think I became disenchanted from the mystical idea of dead people a long time ago…. or something. Still, there are very few people with whom I can talk about some things, and that is unfortunate.
I was talking to my brother, as I said, and I noticed I had been talking about songs that reminded me of really shitty times in my life. Like, these are songs I can not and will not listen to. So, I decided to listen to those songs tonight, and I felt sad and lousy. I really wanted to feel as awful as I once did. While those songs reminded me of feeling bad, which made me feel bad, it’ll never be like that again.
Example
1) Song one: The Scientest by Coldplay.
A day or two after my dad died, I remember waking up in my old bedroom at my mom’s house. I used to call that house “my house”, or “my parents’ house”. At some point I started calling that house “my mom’s house”, and that was strange. Wasn’t that house still “my house” even though I hadn’t lived there since I was a teenager? Wasn’t that house still “my parents’ house” even though only one of my parents is still alive?
So I woke up in the bedroom at whatever that house is called. It was late may, and it may or may not have been a nice day. I think it was one of those overcast days, but the sun is still bright enough that it’s like the sky is a giant fluorescent light bulb, making you and everything else look ugly, sick and artificial. My dad had been dead for a short enough time that I didn’t know what was real or what was going on. People were coming over to the house in droves. People who never had known me, or hadn’t seen me since I was an infant were there. Some of the people who showed up didn’t know who I was, so figured I was just as much as a well-wisher as they were: “who is this young girl and why is she here?”
I hated basically everyone who came in through that door. I hated them for telling me about people they had care about who were dead, and I hated them for wanting to talk to me, or be charitable.
I woke up to the sound of a group of 14 year olds in my brothers room all singing “The Scientest” by Coldplay. They sang that song over and over. All I could hear was the cracking voices of 14 year old boys and the shrill voices of 14 year old girls singing “NOOOOBODY SAID IT WAS EASY”, and all I wanted was for the sound to go away, because it was interfering with my personal space. But those were my brother’s friends, and they were there to support him, so it’s not like I was going to barge in and tell them to shut up.
So I laid in bed, with the door closed, and fell like a prisoner in a cruel sarcophagus that once held my youth, and everything I understood about myself. I could not go downstairs, because it was full of stupid well-wishers, and I could not escape the sound coming from my brother’s room. So I stayed there, and listened to the song over and over.
When I hear that song, I feel like shit.
