The River (Never Freezes Anymore) - The Burning Hell
The wintry classics feel increasingly inappropriate. I remember building forts in my front yard as a kid, feeling the rumble of the subway pulling into Christie Station through the packed snow. I’m not sure the last time the snow stuck around Toronto long enough for such constructions.
(Mind you, I'm genuinely not sure; I’ve missed the last three Canadian winters from here in California, where the dreaming of white Christmas and Let It Snow! never made much sense.)
Anyway: here’s a song for the uncomfortable knowledge that your nostalgia is bound to places that can no longer exist. Not because they’ve disappeared, but because the weather won’t ever remake them in the same ways.
We went careening down the ice
Contravening advice
You kissed me at the bridge by the store
And the river never freezes anymore
The opposite season's scenery is also irretrievable. Recently, I told a coworker that I don't miss Ontario's mosquitoes. “There are just so few insects in California,” I said, “It's kind of nice.”
“Oh,” he said. “That’s new. We used to hear them in the summers. But the insects are gone now.”
He said it so matter-of-fact. The insects are gone now. The river never freezes anymore.
There's a feeling I'm fond of that I call pre-emptive nostalgia. The feeling when you become aware that you might be experiencing something for the last time, and you inadvertently distance yourself from the moment, trying to absorb whatever essence of it your future self might want to recall.
And I was like, “I’m barely a teenager, I’m not supposed to believe in nostalgia”
But I remember predicting I’d feel it later, that night on the river when I held you
Well, I guess I told me so
And that's how it goes
I was never pre-emptively nostalgic for frozen rivers and white Christmases. It hadn't occurred to me that any of those times might have been the last.