55. Panda Bear - “Tropic Of Cancer”

This song perfectly captures the ethereal confusion of loss. The standstill of time and thought, where the mind and reality are in flux, and the world becomes both more real and less real than it has ever been before. Suddenly, it’s as if there’s an insurmountable abyss between you and existence, yet at the same time you’re choking on it, with the weight of the moment sliding down your throat and infecting your insides even while you find your mind suspended in the cold loneliness of space. Its falling down the well of existential reflection, the moment a being who has only ever known life tries to grasp the concept of death. It’s coming to terms with the meaning of forever, the feeling of forever, the obliteration of a life, of a personality and a relationship, a voice and touch, a unique individual that will never again be known - gone, in the blink of an eye, wiped from history, relegated to live on only as a memory. They feel so close, yet they’re so far, farther away than they’ve ever been before, farther away than life and reality, beyond it, unreachable, separated from you eternally, where no car, plane, phone, or even letter can go. They’re just gone, forever silenced, and you never even got to say goodbye.