(sanaa)

i'm thankful that black by pearl jam is evergreen, as evergreen as the first punches of heartbreak, that it sounds urgent and wrenching at all times of the day and night. i'm thankful that this song has sustained me over many moods, from the very first time i heard it via my cousin as an impressionable teenage thing. i’m thankful i was eager to soak up his musical knowledge and share whatever limited amount i had so together we decided to set up an email address where we could each upload songs we liked, with a little sentence or two explaining why. i'm thankful that in the early days i committed to this and i'm especially thankful this remains my primary email address so these tiny imprints of music linger at the beginning of this virtual box of correspondence around which a lot of my life is tethered. 

i'm almost thankful that i deleted quite a few of these songs because the attachments were large and i was worried i would need space for something i have not yet needed space for. i'm almost thankful for this because i know upon revisiting these emails i would have involuntarily cringed for days at the particular brand of young earnestness and sincerity that accompanied my musical loves. i'm thankful that i have held on to these qualities even if they are no longer expressed in messages to an older cousin who encouraged them just by being there on the other side. i'm thankful for him. 

i'm thankful for a memory that is patchy but unrelenting so i can still remember what songs i sent and received and trace the lineage of my taste through these tunnels. i'm thankful for winamp media player for never judging me or spying on me (hello spotify) every time i looped black, every time i played and paused and replayed the searing pain of eddie vedder asking why can't it be him. i’m thankful for the mtv unplugged version where this is felt even more acutely but ends with cheers and applause that unnerves me like eye contact with a stranger in the middle of reading a sad passage of words while i'm on the train.

i'm thankful i lost this song for some years, in my own memory and in the folders and shelves in my music library. i'm thankful it returned to me. i'm thankful for the one lazy afternoon at my desk that i took a deep dive into pearl jam and read any interview i could find from around the time ten was released and i am ever so thankful to have learnt about some of the conversations the band had about this release, the value of music videos and the fragility of emotion when it is expelled out into the world. 

i'm thankful for the way voices of men from this era of my life are both vivid flashes of pain and also tired, gruelling aches settling deep in my body and i’m thankful that they are eminently welcome in my every day, some attached to emotion but most to projection. i’m thankful for what i recognise in the voices of women from this era of my life, about them and about me and about us, women with hurt and endless love.

i’m thankful that this short note about one song became a short note about a few other things.

- sanaa (5/23/17). tinyletter.com/sanaa