I don’t know if this is true for everyone, but those of us who couldn’t live without music might be able to understand the pain associated with listening to a particular song too soon. “Too soon” is clearly subjective though, and I guess thirty years would seem to definitely not fit that bill. Guess what, surprise gut punch, but not for the same reasons as before.

Dead Can Dance’s Sanvean is that song for me, even though I’ve listened to it multiple times in those thirty years – you know how sometimes a song can be completely fine for you after awhile, but then something else happens in your life that takes you right back to the same feeling? Here I am, crying in my kitchen at 4:52 AM.

I love this band; I love this song. I walked down what we will call an “aisle” to this song in my first wedding. After my divorce a mere four years later, the original feelings of ain’t no way I can listen to this song were in place. It lasted for several years. I wouldn’t even drag it out if I knew I needed a good cry, it was that bad. But then time passed as time is wont to do, and if it was in a random playlist I eventually was able to listen to it and appreciate it as I did before the association (well, almost.)

Thirty years later I thought I was ok. Needless to say that I am in a particularly rough place right now, and I thought it might be good to listen to it in order to work out some feelings. What’s strange to me is how, while it still hit hard and filled me with sadness, a good deal of the original association is gone, and now there’s a brand spanking new melancholy to it. So yeah, no sleep + Lisa Gerrard = kitchen tears.

Not dissimilar from all the above is Tori Amos’ Tear in Your Hand (one could say the ‘90s were an emotional asswhip for young ladeeez; don’t you dare start throwing in Sarah McLachlan). Look, lots of Tori Amos songs are going to transport me right back to college and that entire existence – the misery of never having money, the pain of unrequited love, the feeling that nothing I did in school was ever good or enough. I’m looking back on that young woman who was so lost with so much love and care for her, and yet this song in particular will never lose the same feeling it gave me then: I love you, you love someone else, it hurts, I don’t want to feel this way anymore. This song wasn’t hard to listen to after some time – until it was again. It is in the rotation but it’s still going to make me cry. Every. Time.

I guess I’m ok with that. Because all of these feelings have to have a place to go. They can’t live inside of me forever. Or they can, but maybe lose a little impact each time.

Is any of that even true? Or am I just telling myself a story I want to believe?