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The first Radiohead song I ever heard was "Creep," and that was because I had been fifteen and I was dating a boy who's heart I broke with infidelity. He sent me the lyrics in a grief-stricken email so I downloaded the song. Even now, whenever I hear that song, I am instantly transported back nine years ago, and I am sitting at my desk in the bedroom I begrudgingly shared with my kid sister, listening to that song, feeling everything as if it were the end of the world.
Nine years later, the boy has changed but Radiohead somehow remains. I discovered In Rainbows at a low point, and the album helped save my life. At the time, the boy I was in love with was on a months-long voyage across the Atlantic and I was finishing up my last year of college. I had been crying in my car on a rainy day to "Reckoner." In a moment of desperation, I looked into myself and cried out to him...and he responded. I instantly felt lifted and comforted. He was the kind of boy who made me believe in miracles.
He's gone, but the music lingers. In fact, I caught a snatch of "Reckoner" on a recent trip, playing out of someone's passenger window. My step faltered as I recalled that moment of surprising peace.
You know, grief is a seemingly endless hallway in a stranger's dimly lit house. I was in love, and now that love is gone. I was relieved to finally untangle myself from it, not because the love had hurt me, but because the light of the love had been shut out. I accept what has happened and I accept what will never happen again. At this point all I have is the slow process of grieving.
I was shamelessly in love. He was not a crutch for my insecurities, but a precious thing I treasured. I learned from him, I grew with him, I drew inspiration from him, and I gave myself to him. I am grateful for what transpired between us in our secret garden of pleasures. We were deeply connected. We were far from perfect, but we were everything you could have asked for in the haze of youth.
I have learned that life is unexpected, but I cannot foresee a future friendship between us. It's as if we were made to be lovers only, sharing a bond that now severed, would wreck my heart should I ever try to recover even just some part of it. We were written in a time and in a place, and our story is over.
I have let go, I have moved on, I can enjoy listening to those songs with someone else. But grief is a disease that moves slowly through you. I have lost him. And I wander down this hallway, turning knobs, some of which give way, and others which remain locked. I enter the rooms that I can, where I learn some new thing about myself or about the world, or where I am granted some boon of strength. Sometimes the room is a trap and I must struggle to get out. But they are all only rooms, and I must return to the hallway, to walk on and on.
Sometimes when the world is moving quickly all around me, I find myself retreating into myself, and in the hallway, I am slumped against the wall with my head in my hands. In real life, I am crying, sometimes in private, sometimes in public. I no longer care who is witness to my tears.
And sometimes, when the world is moving in the direction I desire, I see a door at the end of the hallway, and I rush forward. In my excitement I ignore the doors opening to either side of me.
When I open the door, I am standing at the end of another hallway. And so I have to begin walking again.
Writing February 18th 2009
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