Thoughts For You From a Sunny Day

You know who you are, and you wouldn't appreciate it if I said your name; it'd just add to your hurt and your pain. I won't make you bleed in public.

I don't yet have the words to say it right.

But I have a gift for you, a little spiky and fragile, a song... This is one I enjoy for the the music, and the context and connotations and the world I was living, the person I was when I first heard it.

But also for the lyrics.

As the years go by, some songs from my childhood have become as trite and awful as trying to recapture the magic of childhood cartoons, or the first drunken time I saw Heavy Metal, or the wonder the first time I saw anime - learning that such a new and very different art form existed.

But some? The lyrics grow in meaning as I've grown.

And this song, it was so easy on the ears as a dance floor respite when the entire world was mine to explore, and the clubs brilliant and beautiful and I could dance until they closed, then drink coffee and catch the well-after-midnight trains till we walked and laughed and ran through the Loop, twirling in the silent streets, hands out for balance on the edges of the flower planters, dancing on the benches, owning the silent downtown, the sleeping city. We swaggered and staggered and laughed until we were collapsing in the park, a happy group of friends as the sun rose over the lake and the city came to life.

Now, though, years later, all too many funerals and memorial services, wakes, and search and rescues turned into search and retrieval instead... I hear most prominently the line half-hidden softly at the end, the advice that came too late. Because as sugary and poppy as it sounds on the surface, at heart it's an an elegy, written for a comrade already gone into the darkness.

Take it easy on yourself...

Please, when you're feeling overwhelmed and stressed, when the to-dos seem overwhelming, when you're staring at up at the mountain of all you want to become, and to have done (but barely started, and despair at succeeding), when you're staring down at the wreckage of your carefully crafted life and plans...

Take it easy on yourself.

We'll be here for you.

I'll be waiting.

https://youtu.be/5UXnulANF8g