She’s only 17!!!
I’ve kissed enough bathroom sinks
To make up for the lovers who never loved me
- “Go Home”, Julien Baker
This is how you remind me of what I really am
The saddest song ever made is “real death” by Mount Eerie. The singer’s wife had just died from a terrible cancer after 13 years of marriage and the birth of a, at a time, 1 year old daughter. He managed to pull himself together and gather the energy to make a record documenting his post-death experience, from it resulted my favourite album from the 2010s “a crow looked at me”:
Real death:
Death is real,
Someone’s there and then they’re not
And it’s not for singing about
It’s not for making into art.
When real death enters the house, all poetry is dumb.
When I walk into the room where you were
And look into the emptiness instead
All fails:
My knees fail,
My brain fails,
Words fail.
Crusted with tears, catatonic and raw
I go downstairs and outside and you still get mail:
A week after you died a package with your name on it came
And inside was a gift for our daughter you had ordered in secret
And collapsed there on the front steps I wailed;
A backpack for when she goes to school a couple years from now
You were thinking ahead to a future you must have known
Deep down would not include you
Though you clawed at the cliff you were sliding down
Being swallowed into a silence that’s bottomless and real.
It’s dumb,
And I don’t want to learn anything from this.
I love you
“Please tell mom this is not her fault”
Adams Song – Blink 182