This is a love letter to a song that has soothed and uplifted me throughout the past 2.5 years. I listen to the nearly 10-minutes version on replay as needed. (The remastered 2023 is the one I have been listening to lately.)
I get lost in the cyclical and machine-like raps and whips with the voluminous piano melody in the first few minutes. In the warm up, I often have an imagery of an industrial printing press factory - I see iron gears being oiled and pumped by steam engines. I am not entirely sure of how the mechanics work, but I hear the sounds of the cyclical nature of human routines. Despite these routines, despite the surety of how certain the sun rises and sets in a day, of how predictable seasons are, of how I can preemptively sense my moods — I now give myself space and time to cry on certain things — I dance through it all. I am spun around and my head finds itself in a canopy of trees — of all the trees I’ve experienced when underneath them since the early days of my childhood. I see and remember them all.
The familiarity of my own body, seeing itself in the mirror, putting on my clothes, fixing my hair, starting it all over again, I’m 25, and it somewhat feels all the same. I have been on my own for quite a while now, seeking my own path in life, moving to a different city, state, still an entry-level job, yet meeting so many people, experiencing and encountering so many stories.
Why do I do this?
I do it for my dreams, for the people I love, and for those I will meet later in life.
I was recently told, “You are rays of light, whatever you touch turns into something beautiful.”
And for all the promises I have made that I have broken and I do not regret - King Creosote begins to sing as softly as dews dapple on the stems of grass, after a harsh thunderous night, a long day, a tiresome length of time, — at 3:58, he sighs,
“You’ve answered my prayer for a worthless diamond in our carbon lives. You said it’d always be fine… And you said you’d never stop coming ‘round in the dead of the night. You said forever was unkind.”
These lyrics have intrigued me ever since the first time I recognized there were lyrics embedded in this beautiful piece. I have never quite deciphered them clearly as I wanted to.
Do you know when we were younger and promised ourselves to be a doctor, astronaut, or marine biologist? I did so many of that. As the world continues to reveal itself in disappointing ways, such as when I experience subvert racial prejudice, observe unfair power dynamics in capitalist systems, and gender discrimination, there is a bit of recoil and apprehensiveness that I often use as a defense mechanism to cope with. This song helps that.
In a metaphorical sense, there is also this dreaminess that I’ve sought in movies and novels where I believed things to be “forever.” But when we’re young, we don’t know about these things.
After a long while, for my 500th—or something—listen, with all the disappointments in my twenties that I’ve had, I have claimed it as my own. I am the only person that I trust and care about deeply who could take hurt, banality, or discomfort and flip it around into something beautiful.
Dear me,
This song is for you. It was meant for you since the very beginning. Nothing is permanent. Nothing is meant to last forever. Kindness takes the approach of recognizing our fears that the present moment is the only seizable moment.
Love, Thi