@matthewdelaney3466

4 years ago

This song reminds me of a very specific time. They say smell is linked with memory, but music takes you places even deeper. Me and my girlfriend were falling out roughly a year ago. This break up was shortly after I had bought us two tickets for a concert the Strokes were playing. She had just moved to a new city, the concert happened to be there. She meant for me to move there with her and settle. Anyway, I promised her I’d mail her the tickets, as a goodbye gift. I bought her a card, had the tickets enclosed in there. This was all a sudden, last minute thing, so I biked to the post office as fast as I could in the summer heat, scaling hills, listening to the frenetic moods, the dense textures of Comedown Machine. “I want to see you Wednesday” and “I’ll be there” soaked into that moment I navigated through so sweetly, that it felt like a theme song, the tension of the muted guitar bridge and the release into the chorus, vindicated my doubts of going this far for her, for nothing. It’s because I remembered what our relationship did. It let me discover we were one. I wanted her to just feel peace. To be alright. That came from a purer place than my desire to want to possess her, to be resentful. I got into a car accident when I suddenly was hit by some old woman who didn’t see my crossing the street, the police came, this woman I’ll never forget saw me bruised up, but I was eager to leave, so she let me go reluctantly, and said “if you feel sick or dizzy, lay on the grass, call 911, and I will find you.” It struck me as a soft kind of selfless love, the affinity, the will to help a stranger. I got to the post office just before it closed, mailed everything. Just before sending it off, I hesitated what to write her in that card. I realized I couldn’t say anything. So I settled on a basic platitude. We were friends and I loved her no matter what. We barely talked after this. The days leading up to the concert she was crying, really broken down, said she thinks she made a horrible mistake. I reassured her in a distant, shell shocked kind of way. We were separating back into the chaos that brought us together. The last thing she sent me was a clip of Julian playing Under Control live, which she said reminded her of me. She also said she can never listen to the Strokes again, cus it’s too heartbreaking. It luckily didn’t have that effect on me, after a while.

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