This Song and This Sign

My copy of Updike’s Museum and Women, and Other Stories is stamped inside with red-ink THE CANTERBURY HOTEL, which I conduct a quick search of – as generic a name it might be – and find nothing at all. I cannot even be sure it is in Canterbury. Such a wonderful smell from the fifty-year-old book! When was the tree felled? During the seventies? What a journey it took and how it broke down upon the shelves of time, pinched and squeezed! The cover photograph, a profile of Grecian marble, is by Humphrey Sutton, who, one suspects, is dead by now.
    It was just a thought, and I did not mean anything by it as I mean nothing by any of my thoughts. When [redacted #1] left me, there were songs I sank into and songs I avoided. I even made a playlist (stored on a 128GB microSD, notched into some discontinued Sony MP3 player [whereabouts unknown]) of songs that, at the time, provided a confusing level of comfort when listened to on repeat through the streets of London. After [redacted #2] left me, there were other songs I sank into and songs I avoided, whole albums I listened to along a lockdown’d coastline. It is a pattern. If nothing else, art should keep one company. It is the attachment of people or memory to music that elevates it above the beauty of its melody or poetic lyricism.

    ‘Why self-harm?’ I asked—‘Why cut yourself?’
    ‘Some – not all – view it as when the wound heals so does the trauma, if that makes sense?’
    If at first the songs hurt, over time they did not. Then they hurt again. They went in and out of phase. It was confusing, and most humans are ill-equipped to deal with such shifts.
    ‘I can’t listen to This Must Be The Place by Talking Heads anymore,’ he said on the Isle of Dogs.
    I told him—‘Me neither,’ pushing gravy around the plate with a stalk of broccoli.
    And then [redacted #2] took Dylan’s Nashville Skyline with her, which I did not mind so much as Cash’s voice had lost its spark by then, but the whole album always reminded me of hurrying to the train station in late-spring mornings, as well as [redacted #2]. It was not hard to say good-bye. So much music reminds me of motion and love, love and motion.

    On a summer morning my mother told me that my brother had just been checked into a rehabilitation facility. There is this smooth movement I do when I get to my desk: take my headphones out, say good morning, put my backpack on the chair, turn on my laptop, put the mouse down half a foot from the screen, plug the cable into its side. The office radio was already going and it played Tears For Fears’ Everybody Wants To Rule The World. It seemed like a sign because it was one of my brother’s favourites, and because the glorious summer morning charged beneath the blinds and drenched my desk, I thought that it might be a good sign. Much later, after he had left the rehabilitation facility and began to soberly reflect on his partner leaving him, I told my brother about this song and this sign. He told me he could no longer listen to Everybody Wants To Rule The World. The song was lost to him.

    But then, the thought – the thought I had been thinking all along – was of the love songs released between [redacted #1] leaving me and my youngest brother checking into the rehabilitation facility after his partner broke up with him. His partner introduced him to lots of new pop songs and he disliked them at first, until he listened to them so often that he developed a kind of Stockholm syndrome for them. Everything by Harry Styles had gone back to being unbearable but for wholly different reasons. A couple of years ago, my brother and his partner invited me over for dinner and in the morning he drove me back to our parents’. As his car sped along, he played the Stiles CD through the player and we smoked with the windows down and cold misty morning air rushing in over the music.