48. Cigarettes After Sex - “K”

There’s something attractive about wistful montages, about getting lost in memories and retracing the good and the bad, memorizing the edges and the contours of the past in an effort to better understand them, or perhaps simply to cocoon yourself in something familiar, something known and gone that no longer exists, regardless of whether it causes joy or pain.

This jam inspires such thoughts. I think it straddles the line between joy and pain, like sitting on a fallen log and letting the toes of each foot dip into and ripple the water beneath. The protagonist isn’t speaking from a position of total loss, but rather from a state of temporal loss. It’s tracing the line of a relationship and looking back at just how much it has changed over time. He’s gazing into the magic of the initial spark and its ensuing conflagration – those days when everything was new and fresh and covered in a sort of halcyon haze. There’s a definitely a sense of melancholy and loss, but the cool shade of those feelings intermingles with the slow burning glow of contentment. It’s a sensation not inspired by regret or longing, but rather by appreciation, like connecting enough individual dots to finally see a beautiful image emerge. Their love is aging. It’s wearing and weathering with the passage of time, but it’s also growing, accumulating more and more shared experiences, increasing in depth until it resembles something that is wholly unique to them.