i’m feeling very fucked up about the passage of time, lately. they keep playing the stephen hawking movie at my work and it makes me cry every time i see it and i have to hide in the bathroom. it’s just — everything is gone! do you know what i mean? everything that is past is past, the good parts and the bad parts. the wheel is always rolling forward, the side-scrolling video game only goes one way. you can’t get it back. at the end of the movie what happens is time starts to move backward, right, back through his illness and all the heartbreak and everything, and he gets up out of the chair and he’s marrying his wife again, and flower petals fall on them and they kiss each other and you can never, ever get it back. that’s the whole point, right — the theory of everything is that time has a beginning. like, everything is expanding and so by that logic if you reverse time everything contracts, all the way back to the singularity that created everything. and we know that now, because of him, and it’s a fact but it is a fact in the way that you were happy once is a fact. it’s not tangible. you can’t go back. you can’t rewind. time has a beginning but you will never see it. i was trying to explain it to my mother and i said it’s like being across a very deep but very narrow river, one that seems easy to cross but is bottomless and swift and breathtakingly cold. the past is so close but it is also gone. it is behind a translucent veil made of iron. your memories of your memories exist and you can keep them polished but they still fade and even if they don’t, even if you somehow recreated every one of them they would still be different. you can’t go back. the memory of an emotion is not an emotion, or at least it’s not that emotion. it’s something different. and in a lot of cases it’s better, i know that, i get that, but still! still this inexorable tipping forward, this life which is essentially just falling. gravity and time, you know? they pull you and pull you and pull you. and things change and grow and die and become different and they are never the same. it seems so factual and obvious and yet for some reason it is punching me in the heart this week.
anyway, here’s three songs that all have the same refrain and yet are three entirely different microcosms of a relationship, of the spaces between people. how they change! how they fill with static crackling nerves and held breath, how they soften into something sweet and warm and golden, how they widen and widen. you can’t go back.
but youyou could be the oneyeah you could be the one
baby let’s go get losti like that you’re drivin’ slowkeepin’ my fingers crossed thatmaybe you’ll take the long way home
let’s get losti don’t wanna let you gokeepin’ my fingers crossed thatmaybe you’ll take the long way home
we know this is the way it’s supposed to be
so we’re taking the long way home’cause i don’t wanna be wasting my time alonei wanna get lost and drive forever with youtalkin’ bout nothing, yeah, whatever, babyso we’re taking the long way home
seems like many years agoit’s strange how you can never know who’sgoing to stay with you and who will leavedo you remember me?do you remember me?
one day further down the roadwith full-grown children of your ownif i pass by you on a busy streetwill you remember me?will you remember me?
on that night long ago (do you remember me?)walking down the road that we used to knowyou said “let’s take it slow, let’s take the long way home”let’s take the long way home