starbucks seems committed to making me think of you. whenever i go in there, the first song i hear on sitting down is always house of cards by radiohead. it's funny, because this is your least favourite song on the album; this is why it will always remind me of you. when it plays, i can hear you tell me - your voice overlapping thom yorke's - that you think it's an unspectacular track in the midst of the sublime. i can see your shrug of dismissal when i play it (because i love it and want to listen to it with you).
i am constantly surprised by this, even though it keeps happening. the little shock of remembering you, as though your hand (that i didn't see coming) had just touched my shoulder. as though i knocked for you the one time in ten you happened to be in, or awake, and the door was suddenly open, and you were standing there wearing a silly woollen hat.
our brains keep people wrapped in particular places, or poems, or songs, and with one word or note, with no warning, they come (uncontrollably, shockingly) swooping forward in half a second, sweep us off our feet. and we try to control or arrange these associations - alway without success. i remember one boyfriend and i choosing 'our song', trying to carve a little niche for ourselves in the chorus. it didn't work in the slightest; i could listen to teenage kicks for seventeen hours on end on not think of him once. and yet, this one song, that you don't even like, that we listened to together once, makes me catch my breath.
when it has finished, i listen to it again on my ipod to keep the feeling a tiny bit longer. it makes you clearer - brings you into focus - and i am worried that you are fading.
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