Hard Candy Christmas - Tracey Thorn
I knew this song would end up on this year’s mix after hearing the first two lines, which felt a bit personally targeted:
Hey, maybe I’ll dye my hair
Maybe I’ll move somewhere
I spent Saturday afternoon bleaching my hair in advance of getting a photo taken for a visa application, so. The overall mood of the song is a sort of aimless optionality: maybe I’ll sleep real late, maybe I’ll lose some weight… maybe I’ll settle down, maybe I’ll just leave town. The last time I left a town, it was because I didn’t want to settle down forever in California, and “not forever” has to translate until “not now” or else eventually become untrue.
But I haven’t really done any settling down in Ontario. At first, I blamed the pandemic. It’s harder to find community when everywhere you might meet someone is only open for curbside pick-up. But then the libraries reopened, and I obsessively scrolled Twitter to find a pop-up vaccine clinic, and soon I saw people drinking on patios and wearing surgical masks to the climbing gym. I didn’t particularly want to join them. Settling into a place requires investment, emotional and otherwise. It seems I’m still too grief-bruised for that.
It’s been two and a half years, and I’m pretty used to Zach being dead. Sometimes when I see a picture of them, I miss them the way I might miss someone who is still alive, just a fond flash of memory without a twist of pain afterwards. I don’t think of Zach every day, which makes me sad. It feels like they are slowly becoming a part of my backstory, when they used to be a part of my mind. I do think of Zach most days, often with some resentment when I’m forced to form an opinion all by myself, without their clever empathy and encyclopedic context. Borrowing from Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Dirge Without Music:
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.
I think there will come a time when I have grown so used to that loss that I’m ready to throw myself into constructing a new life. But not yet. I’m leaning into the aimless optionality instead. Maybe I’ll move to Paris, maybe I’ll drive across the country, maybe I will find an unexpected community, maybe I will be lonely, but lonely as a plane rides lonely and level on its radio beam. The chorus insists: me, I’ll be just fine. I think that’s right.
Wishing you good options to aim for,
Tessa