This article came about after realizing ephemeral nature of many relationships.
This was a reoccurring thought that swirled around in my head for days making it hard to concentrate. It came with the ramifications of blocking my mind out from doing other work. My wandering reflection on this would hinder my productivity. I just couldn’t get anything done. By putting it down in written form my mind cleared and the essays finalized as a byproduct. To my surprise what I thought was going to be a couple essays on the website turned into a long form multipage work.
There is a Pedro the Lion song off of their new album "Havasu" called “Teenage Sequencer” about a relationship he started in a school he just moved to. It fell apart and the person it involved didn’t notice that dumping him was a mistake until he moved again at the end of that year.
Four breakups later
You'd watched me all year
and you knew Bill was wrong
and you wished you had stayed
through the end of our song
The way he puts it “our song,” comparing his encounter to lyrics contained of a four minute piece. Neither of them were aware the short stint they had and this realization gets only more poignant as years go by. At least that is what I think because you don’t fully realize the importance of some people while also not connecting with the reality that this could very well be your one chance. I can’t see any rhyme or reason why it works this way but it seems like that is the way life is. At least quite often.
I once walked up next to someone at a bus stop who seemed slightly familiar and we talked for what had to be less than a few minutes. Somehow we realized we were standing at the wrong stop. As we started running five blocks down the road it occurred to me that we sat across from each other in art class for at least a semester. When that occurred to me I wanted to say something. Between my needing to ask questions and the difficultly of just carrying on that conversation while performing a sprint I didn’t bring it up. I sent him a message on Facebook to ask how things are going and he said honestly it has been better. Then the the discussion just ended as he seems to be one of those people that doesn’t use social media all that often and that was the end of it.
This brevity should force a careful
examination of what relationships are
This brevity should force a careful
examination of what relationships are
worth pursuing and which to move on from. Sometimes it can be hard to scrutinize the two. It can really take being around a person for quite an intervening period to know that by doing this you may be missing out on a more critical relationship. The ones that are worth putting effort into so often go by in the blink of an eye. It can be hard but necessary to rank which are the most worthwhile. Perhaps it can take months to figure that out. I wish it didn’t.
I read a review that said the album the song is from called “Havasu,” got delayed from an early 2020 release until 2022. This gave me a chance to get many of my own ideas on the subject written down and question my own thoughts. The extended period to think things through forced me to work at the writing rather than using someone else as a crutch. While this was a harder route and written over many months it allowed for more thoughts to develop.
Knowing what his thoughts were later added to the discussion without interfering with it. That makes me think about these lyrics from his song –Impermanent Record – “I store my thoughts in other people’s heads then I question what they know.” Great line. I just noticed after writing that last paragraph that Havasu is about living in one place for a year and it took him that same amount of time to rework the album. While he was doing that I was putting this together during the same juncture.
In the last couple of months I started collecting yearbooks as a hobby. I originally set out searching for one that I didn't receive in sixth grade. I never found it but to my surprise I did find a ton of phenomenally designed yearbooks put out from a nearby high school. Some of their books had double the page count and were in full color. This school clearly didn’t have the same financial constraints mine had! While I was flipping through one of them I came across something that appears in almost no yearbooks which was a eulogy for a kid who didn’t live to attend his Junior year. It was a very short section with one quote from himself and two students who knew him. There were no insights on his short life beyond that.
Usually with this kind of thing in a newspaper there is a paragraph, minimum, explaining what the person was about. While going through the back of this very yearbook had quite long section of write ups embellished by their parents and siblings for many individual students. I have to wonder why the eulogy even made it in at all. Was it the fact that the yearbook was about 100 pages longer than most of my yearbooks? If they had tighter budget constraints I would bet the tribute would have been one of the first things to get cut. After searching the net I found that not all yearbook staff follow the same policy on whether to include them or not. This is in part because it can become complicated depending on the circumstances.
I can see how this is a strange topic to bring up. I understand that completely. It is the weirdest thing to throw in the middle of these writings. It didn’t make sense to me for a long time but after experiencing the extreme isolation of the pandemic there was this kind of hyper-fixation on loss that I never quite had before. I like most of the world never experienced life cut off in this way and not at this magnitude until now. It isn’t necessarily about death, it could just be like in the song about moving away from a friend you barely knew or a person you bump into at the bus stop from high school and never really see again. It just seems that I notice these kind of things happening a lot more. A person I follow on Twitter had a baby brother that you could tell he cherished more than anything in the world. I would enjoy listening to whatever new thing he had to say about him each day. He would tweet about how getting his baby brother his bottle was his favorite thing to do, bringing in another one before he was ready for it. Just this month he passed away in the night. In consoling him I found it nearly impossible to find the words to respond to such news. What amount of carefully worded displays of sympathy could ever make the slightest sense out of that?
The reason I dwell on loss as it relates to death so much is that the church used a person dying as a way to take advantage of the newly departed friends and family. In Youth Group you were told to use this as an opportunity to proselytize to anyone that person knew. It was like their life was being cheapened to something akin to a business transaction. One of the students I attended youth group with passed away in his early twenties. When I heard back from someone who attended his memorial service it sounded like the whole thing revolved around proselytizing. It wasn't about the young man that died but a rallying call to push their beliefs on what they would call the unsaved. When I get to the section on the Autumn months I reflect on what those terms mean to me now, lost and saved.
