259. Song No. 3,885: “Go Back,” Darlingside
Birds Say, 2015

So the biggest problem I have in maintaining a blog that happens along a deliberately unstructured timeline but also defined stages (listening to music first on my iPod and then [licensing permitting] on Spotify; figuring out what songs to write about; actually sitting down to both start and finish a post) is that so much time can pass between any of those parts. It makes me low-key worry about things like the diminished immediacy of rediscovery’s emotional wallop, forgetting the organic emotion that initial impact inspired, or how such a yawning stretch of time can negate the well-timed art-imitating-life relevancy that made a song hit a little harder upon our 12,700 Songs reintroduction. “Go Back,” however, just really wanted to double down and prove that sometimes a song hits twice as hard in two different ways.

When this track fucking emotionally ambushed me at the beginning of the summer, I was prodigiously, indulgently moping over the reality of my best friend living an entire continent away after coming home from an incredible first time visiting her in her gooooorgeous new home state on the other coast (which also marked the fourth and fifth new states i’ve been inside because of her), plus mourning my lovingly willed-to-life 2006 car that finally gave up the ghost less than 24 before from my flight out to see her, a car in which I’ve driven her from a disastrous family gathering and to a train station that took her away from me again, and was the same car I parked in front of her last home in New Jersey and filled with her U-Pack-bound belongings for her first move more than two years ago.

While this is a song about a “return to who we were / Before we disappeared,” so many of its lyrics were alternately the salve my sad soul needed, lines like “I’m no doctor but I know / You can’t live in the past” and “So we hold to who we are / Even into the arc / Beyond our furthest edges” that echoed how much I was hurting, and just fucking sandpapering an open wound by confronting the core of how I felt.

In the week and a half between coming home and getting a new car, I was commuting in my mother-in-law’s Mercury Marquis, which is old enough to drink and feels an awful lot like driving around in not only a recliner but also the entire living room. But the best part about MIL’s boat of a car is the iPod tape-deck adapter that let me take this project on the road to and from work, though that made giving this well-timed song my full attention hurt a little more poignantly than I needed it to: With Darlinsgide being a band that bestie introduced me to, hearing this as I drove past both places she used to live and how deeply it hurt to remember that she used to live so close I’d pass her last Jersey street while running errands, it hit exponentially harder to hear a song about going back when that was what I wanted more than anything else.

Now that I’m finally getting around to writing about it two months later at the tail end of August, writing about anything is an effort stippled with the pings and buzzes of people sending their condolences about my mother-in-law’s sudden passing and check-ins and gentle reminders that they’re here to help, and also a fuckton of intrusive thoughts about time and space and the maddening impossibility of going back to how things used to be no matter how close they still feel.

It’s such a fresh loss that I keep thinking the weirdest shit, like how everything except for the recently gifted foodstuffs currently in my house was all placed there while she was still alive. It took actually standing in the middle of her ICU room and asking for a Catholic priest to say whatever they call the Last Rites now to even feel the full weight of five agonizing days; I still haven’t yet cried harder or louder than when, hours later, my now-half-orphan husband and I were peak medicinal drunk and just unloading everything that tore at us, and I let loose some sobbed-out confession that I’m so heartbroken that I can’t just drive down the road to my best friend’s house to find some comfort there. Even in a loss that I’m still processing and feels like I’ve lost my own mother, the parade of thousands of goodbyes that come with a long-distance friend, somehow, has been the deepest cut and the hardest part about not being able to go back and return to who we were.