39. Florist - “What I Wanted to Hold”

Beauty is slippery thing to define. It’s sort of like color or time. It changes with the eye of the beholder, never truly corroborated or fully understood and altering what it looks, feels, and sounds like at will. However, despite its mercurial nature, I do think there is a central quality, or rather some binding and underlying theme or nature, to beauty. There’s an evanescence to it. Beauty cannot exist indefinitely or be common enough to dissolve into a state normalcy. It cannot be held. It must be let go, and if not willingly, then by force or by fate. It has to evaporate from your grasp, leaving you with no choice but to gaze upon it full of appreciative regret.

It’s for this reason that I think beauty and nostalgia are so inextricably intertwined. There’s nothing more indefinite and holier than the past. Even the negative or darker aspects of the past seem to unwillingly gain some sort of eminent significance within our psyche. There’s a power to the past, and that power lies in its unreachable distance. In the ultimate transience of being already gone. The past is helplessly and inevitably blurred, lost amidst a mixture of memories, hopes, dreams, and regrets that are continuously being revisited and remade. Beauty pays no attention to our wants or wishes. It comes and goes at will, perpetually passing us by – sort of like this song.