Play 18 - Play Whatsitcalled For Me

Did you ever see Play Misty For Me? I don't remember the details but it was pretty scary. The early days of the jump cut and they really took it to the max. Anyway, this girl wants to hear the song, again and again. Stalking this radio presenter. I'd give a lot to live in a world where I would never hear the same tune more than once so I don't really relate. 

She's playing it now, that somber tune, again and again, in different arrangements, on different instruments. The sorrow seeps through the walls, through the furniture, pouring out of the kitchen cupboards, the cookie jars, the kettle is brimming with it now. I don't know music but it sounds like a minor key to me.

And it's fine, it's a way to cope. But it brings me to tears nonetheless. 

Isn't it strange how other people's grief compares to our own? A system not learnt really but revealing of our tendencies, our tastes, our mechanisms. As if someone put your personality to the test and then slid it under a microscope. How you grieve is telling of so many things, like a picture taken from a hard to come by angle. 

I would only listen to the same song on repeat if I wanted to indulge, to really soak in my misery, to let it swallow me whole. But if I was truly upset I wouldn't go anywhere near it. Like a child that knows, somewhere deep down inside, that it might jump given the chance doesn't venture out on the edge, I don't take myself out on the brink lest I get tempted to fall. 

But she, she doesn't see music like that, music is cleansing, it's working things out, it's a way through something, not into it. I'd give a lot to have such a beautiful coping mechanism. Her traps, her voluntary prisons, her black pits, are much more mundane and far less dramatic than mine. Both are as real as each other though. 

I don't play Misty for anyone. And I certainly don't play Patsy Kline's Crazy for anything. I'll avoid Gloomy Sunday and Strange Fruit, Billy Holiday. Some things just rip at your soul. I wouldn't even tell you my all time tear jerkers, in case you'd abuse the knowledge. 

But this is one. 

Listen. 

Like Laurie over in the house across the street banging on the piano when Jo's broken his heart. Like Jo I write it all up. I have no piano to sound my feelings. Just words. 

She comes in, tells me my silence is suffocating, full of gloom. 

I want to tell her we all need different things, grieve in our own way. 

I put the kettle on instead. Let the whistle fill the silence, seeing as she hates it so much. 

​