Coldplay “Lovers In Japan (Osaka Sun Mix)”
When something ends, it isn’t the person who causes the lingering pain and heartbreak. Movies about robots and fast cars and robots that turn into fast cars, for him, or cuddling in the morning long after alarms and numerous missed calls, for you. It isn’t that restaurant or prolonged goodbyes and walks to the station or that particular road or those inside jokes that cause the hurt. We’ll avoid that restaurant, get off a stop earlier, forgo the existence of that road, and inside jokes eventually become faint bits and scraps in our memories, losing all its context, losing all its meaning.
It’s the music that hurts. The songs that remind us of particular moments, certain dates and important hours. Songs that meant nothing at all but were silly and meant the world to us. Songs that remind us of them. It’s the association that nearly kills us. When they no longer exist in your mind, but out of nowhere, it catches you by surprise, pouring out through overhead speakers, your unforgivable iTunes shuffle, commercials and radio stations. It comes out of nowhere, when you least expect it, perhaps you’re in a fitting room and now you’re trapped, already so small and now the walls, the mirrors, the shabby curtains are closing in on you, suffocating you. And you can’t run. You can’t ignore or avoid or forgo existences. It is there. It is real. They no longer exist in your mind but they are rooted firmly in your heart.
It’s not the lyrics that make us laugh or cry; it’s the associations that we make with someplace, sometime, someone. From when this song was first special, not when it was first heard but from when it first played a significant role in my life, it took me two years to be able to hear this song again, to actually speak of this band and restore each and every deleted song. It’s foolish, isn’t it, to literally run away from a song? To have to reeducate yourself to stop forming associations that stop you dead in your tracks? And to have to believe that you love this song merely for what it is - a really great song
And to give up a song, a whole band because of a little inevitable thing we call heartbreak? That’s really foolish.
