For as long as you can

Tonight you think of your lost loves — both the loves you once had that departed in some way and for some reason, and the ones that you yearned for, drew close to, but never really held.

You have promised yourself that you will not be maudlin. Things happen for a reason, you have been told repeatedly, and you have come to accept this, though more out of an unwillingness to debate the point than any real conviction. Situated as you are at a point where you can consider yourself a happy person on the whole, going over memories of lost loves has more of the quality of a personal film festival of sorts, a retrospective, than of self-flagellation.

Like much else in your life, this mood was inspired by films, and by music. You watched Lost in Translation again the other day — you have been watching it approximately once a year, you realize, since it first came out; not because of any self-established ritual fraught with secret significance, but just because you feel the need every once in a while to revisit its comforting alienation, its vibrant stillness.

You were playing the soundtrack this morning, basking in the sounds of City Girl and Alone in Kyoto as you were recovering from one of the more harrowing nights of work in recent memory. Your brain and body felt fragmented but it seemed that Kevin Shields and Air were helping to draw the bits together again, slow second by second, or at least pouring some sort of aural salve over all the cracks. And then Just Like Honey came on and you marveled at how long it’s been since you listened to the Jesus and Mary Chain, and you wondered why.

Lost in translation: A shimmery city soundtrack

Last night you watched Never Let Me Go. You have never read the book, and though you anticipated it, you were still unprepared for the bleakness. It is not entirely without cheer, or sweetness, but such moments really only make the inevitable worse.

It made you wonder about love, all love, about its verification or lack thereof, about its often-elusive nature, about how whether people decide to pursue it or hold on to it tightly or let go seems to make no difference in the end to its outcome.

And because you are who you are, you think about music and love: about how there really are no rules for why a voice grates or charms, and about how one can list all the qualities one could want in a song and then hear a song with all those qualities and either love it or be totally unmoved. There are songs you hear once that alter something inside you even if you never hear them again. There are overlapping mysteries everywhere, and even the wisdom that feathers easiest against the ear — just enjoy it, whatever it is, for as long as you can — seems inadequate.

There is a scene in Never Let Me Go that stays with you, that captures very well the power that music can hold over a young soul: Kathy, the young female protagonist, is listening to a cassette given to her by a boy she likes. As a sentimental song plays, and the words croon across and around the room, she reaches for her pillow, and holds it tightly to her humming heart.