Essay: Riding A Train I’m Not On

“At sundown it feels like I’m riding a train I’m not on” 

These are the first words we hear from Craig Finn, incanting the phrase twice above pulsating synthesizers and acoustic guitar as the band opens Messing With The Settings.

It is of course an impossible statement, yet it gave words to the way I was experiencing life at the time; something like a passenger, a physical entity existing but abandoned. I was vitality dropping in and out, a radio station past city limits, short bursts of music growing further apart as static enveloped.

Friends, my love left me in the spring, or rather my love informed me that I would be leaving in the spring. It’s strange, to have your world disintegrate while nature performs its annual Lazarus.

As I packed my boxes, boxes I’d unpacked a year and a half earlier, boxes in general being something I never considered I would have to pack alone again I made sure I left the speakers out.

Messing With The Settings had just been released and it played on loop that entire week. So much so that when I listen now my brain can project the percussion I added; the squeal of clear tape shutting flaps, the back door swinging open and closed under the cover of night because I couldn’t handle explaining to the neighbor, the rustle of my body tossing on a now impossibly large mattress, Jermaine holding me up as salt permeated his Blue Jays jersey.

My artistic tastes teeter towards the difficult, the off-kilter, stunning that requires squinting. I distrust obvious and define beauty as complex, containing ugly, containing failing, full of everything. (Is it obvious yet, the way I feel about myself?) In art, in the world, I want to hear the effort. I want to know that there is trying involved.

Craig Finn isn’t the world’s greatest singer, and in this performance he pulls pitch almost entirely out of the equation. Opting to speak the verses, his conversational timbre leads us in an adult story time about a barstool friendship between Rachel and a nameless narrator. As the strings and drums make their understated entrance the characters start to colour in.

While waiting to pick-up some relief in a friends idling car we hear Rachel speak for the first time –

“This probably isn’t where I see myself forever/ But for now it’s pretty much where we are” 

When my relationship collapsed I gladly allowed the impact to knock all the other dominos to the floor. In someways it was as if I was waiting for an excuse to lose control.

I hope I am not alone in the proclivity to indulge in destruction. When it appears that all is lost there is some dark joy in rolling your body through the ashes, to profligate all energy in self-punishment, in letting the worst of yourself drive for a while.

“We map where we’ve been by the scars on our skin/We can only sing the songs we’ve been taught to” 

As a general rule I dislike the word “scars” in lyrics. The cliche has been used almost as many times as love being a drug. Yet, the visual of tracing drew potency out of the tired image. It provided me a salve in the months to come when I thought I might never create again. It gifted me the ability to try to write new songs to sing, both literally and figuratively. It became a consistent shove forwards whenever I backslid into apathy.

The breakup of a romantic relationship is an interesting world of grief. It is one of the most common human experiences, with a billion pieces of pop media dedicated to the telling. Maybe it is this commonplaceness that as an adult has embarrassment attached to it, as if it is childish in some way.

Which poses the more interesting question:

Why do we consider the emotions of a child as any less valid?

Why are there hierarchies of acceptable suffering?

The death of a grandparent, though sad, is a lesser grief than the passing of a parent or young friend; the putting down of a pet is maybe equal to the loss of a long friendship turned sour; the deflation of letting go of a dream a termite grief that doesn’t warrant bereavement days.

I struggle with this concept.

I didn’t know how to cry for loss when my childhood companion died. A few weeks before his departure we watched Shrek lying in his hospital bed, our gangly boyhood bodies already too long for the frame. I can barely remember his face, but I’ve seen that movie more than any other and have made consistent use of it as a blanket.

I remember my subsequent only friend who I escaped home with. I remember more when he abruptly didn’t want me any longer, his anger taking aim at any reminder of before that July when he spread his mothers ashes in a cicada humming field.

My high school music teacher who taught me piano during summer break in exchange for nothing, who was so kind to me for no particular reason, who was away that fall and then simply away.

When my Grandmother passed, the year I didn’t speak to my parents, my youthful prime when I tried to outrun alone by working into exhaustion, every part-time love that ran its course, the too-many-times my resolve has failed me, friends I thought would be there during despair that were nowhere to be found.

They all felt the same.

Different points of a singular mountain.

“At sundown it feels like I’m riding a train I’m not on/That all-in-one sensation of speeding and sinking” 

Rachel expands upon the introductory line as the band moves into the second verse; a persistent beat in the drums, piano filling the holes between words.

With each goodbye it would reason things should hurt less, us having gained experience from all the times before. Unfortunately, it’s the opposite. A new loss resurrects the others and swirls with the knowledge that there will inevitably be more to come.

I’ve come to understand there is great difficulty in allowing others near when we are in pain. Maybe it’s our animal nature. We hide and keep low to the ground. We lash out at helping hands, considering any movement towards a threat.

“I wasn’t super into confrontation back then/ I was mostly just about sitting by the window/ Watching the flag in the front just twisting/ And twisting, and twisting” 

Friends,

What I am trying to say is my entire life I have wanted to change,

And when catalysts have arrived from that longing prayer

All I have wanted is to stay the same.

What I am trying to say is

Love is always here,

But it is terribly easy to become callus to.

What I am trying to say is:

I spent this year getting back up,

Falling back over,

And getting back up again.

The milestones of growth, movement and healing are rightly to be celebrated, but I wish we brought more attention to the heavy challenge of staying in the same place.

To support the immensity of energy it takes to hold on.

How as soon as you rest the current drags you back.

How treading water is motionless above the surface but exhausting beneath.

There is grandiose drama and firework in falling.

People arrive to hear stories.

A fresh wound intoxicating in primal ways.

Yet, it is time alone,

when you are an insidiously singular being,

tediously pushing your body back to standing

that can become so excruciatingly effortful.

“It’s my first trip back after eight years in Denver/I drove in from the west/ The city looks different now/All those luxury lofts that they built in the old factories/Reminded me of her faith in the industry/Rachel did her best with the deal she’d been dealt/And that’s what I’ve got for a eulogy.”

Friends, what I am trying to say this end of year is

If at sundown it feels like you’re riding a train you’re not on,

I hope you keep hanging on.

I’ll be right there with you.