3. Mount Eerie - “Forest Fire”

I apologize in advance. The last few songs of this list, although beautiful and powerful works of art, will not be particularly cheerful or uplifting. However, if you’re anything like me and you find comfort in sharing devastation and seeing your shadows reflected in the words of someone else, then you’re in for treat. It’s something akin to basic algebra, when two negatives mix to inexplicably turn into a positive. Somehow listening to another’s sadness melds with your own in such a way that it manages to make you feel better.

Now, make no mistake, this song is wholly and utterly devastating, and yet somehow its devastation is comforting. It’s like escaping the cold despair of sadness by crawling within an open wound. It shouldn’t feel good, but it does. The pain is reassuring – either because it helps you escape the numbness and allows you feel alive, or because it replaces the loss, acting as a stand in for whoever was lost. The pain means that they’re still here. It’s almost as if their alive even in their absence – living within the constricted chest, sore throat, or damp eyes that seize you with every realization that you’ll never experience anything new with them again. They’re frozen now, relegated to the past, inert and only felt within the echoes of memory. However, all frozen things melt. They fade, and the harder you try to hold onto them, the quicker they slip away.

This song is that sensation given life. It’s the heartache of letting go. Of watching an existence erode even as it washes over you. It’s gazing into time as it restitches the void. Memories and realizations that once struck with clarity and poignancy begin to dull through constant revisiting. It’s no different than any addiction. You build up a resistance to sadness through time until eventually the process of mourning leads to healing. Routine leads you out of the valley, one grueling step after another, until you escape the shadow of death and the absence becomes more or less normalized. Like any good creature struggling to survive, life takes precedence, and death gets left behind, to decompose and fade away.