233. Song No. 3,513: “For Justin,” Dashboard Confessional
The Drowning EP, 2001

I had this song in my head for days—daaaaaays—after 12,700 Songs foisted it on me. I’m not mad about it, I am just continually amazed at the powerful echoes that my comparatively short but obviously intense obsession with Dashboard Confessional has been capable of, only partially evidenced by the multiple entries already here. Although, considering that Dashboard does deserves a lot of credit as the catalyst sending my taste in music in a whole new direction, maybe it shouldn’t really be all that surprising.

The Drowning EP marks one of the earliest completist victories I got to relish, when I was still rewarded for diligently haunting my favorite record stores rather than learning how to trawl the already-vast but nascent interwebs for musical rarities. And there still is plenty of that hard-won-acquisition magic lingering on this short-but-sweet acoustic treat, but the real sorcery is in how these lyrics just came roaring back like it hasn’t been easily a decade and a half since they last flowed in and out of me.

The first time I heard “For Justin” was well before I’d developed any kind of experience-shaped opinions about the necessity of approaching death in a healthy way, with plenty of room to honor one’s grief and the deceased—but still being mindful of the unavoidable truth that we’re all born to die so we have to accept that the only way to deal with one of life’s few and hardest guarantees is to give yourself up to its inevitability and timeline.

There’s a lot about this song written to the cousin Chris Carrabba lost that Younger Me didn’t appreciate by virtue of unknowingly sidestepping any kind of catastrophic loss at that point and having no idea how turbulent the early mourning period is as your entire world shifts and settles into a whole new version of itself, like how quickly and unevenly that first year passes and how to navigate all the morosely unwelcome milestones it sprinkles in its wake as it unfurls toward a future without someone whose absence you never thought you’d survive, let alone learn to get used to.

From its opening lines acknowledging that long process of trying to carry on like a part of yourself hadn’t died with the departed (“It’s been a year now / Since you were here now / And I’ve been trying to heal inside”) to the ways we all try to keep those we’ve lost alive (“And I see your resemblance in my face / And on our birthday / I said an extra wish for you”) to the wholly human impulse to wonder how they’d size up the current state of the mortal coil (“And I wonder if you really wanted it this way”) to the understanding, however begrudgingly extended, that life goes on and survivors do, too, however messy it gets (“And I have learned so much since you’ve been gone / And I have done so little for so long / So now I’ll settle up my grievances”), it’s a gentle reminder that none of us would want our nearest and dearest to be too consumed by grief to embrace life while they still can, so why should we reduce a disproportionate fraction of our remaining days to wallowing in an existential nadir? It’s a surprisingly wistful, matter-of-fact and heartfelt response to death that respects the dead while celebrating their life by living your own with them in your heart, knowing full well that grief is a complicated thing but so is embracing life despite the unavoidable losses it has in store.