When I started this blog, I thought I would post a song everyday for a year. After a few weeks, I changed my mind and made a 100 days my target. Now I want to end it on 69. It's a beautiful number now that I look at it, so symmetrical, in Roman at least. If a link on the net leads you to the last page of this blog and you're in a good mood and everything is in order in life, you can see and enjoy that symmetry. If you were enhancing your physical aptitude in bed till late last night it reminds you of one of the exercises you joyfully performed. I have other interpretations of this number but would rather keep it to myself and let you imagine yours. The abrupt decision to stop this blog here, is a miniature version of one of the unpredictable outcomes of the decisions you plan in life. Besides, I, like many others, have a huge number of favorite special songs, so this blog from the beginning could go on forever but I slammed on the brakes here.
From the day that I started this blog, I was hesitating to post a song towards which I have the most mixed feelings; it opens a wound, it caresses it gently and when the voice of the singer soars, it squeezes my heart and throws it up in the air.
On the day the singer died, I was having dinner at a pub with a group of my friends in Toronto, on the 23rd of July, 2011. I remember the song was played after the news of her death was announced. I could eat with difficulty and while I was trying to be sociable and smile, some agonizing feeling harrowed my heart. The overdose is not uncommon among musicians. I just saw something more to it, pain, sadness, devastation, unrequited love, loneliness, too much goodness maybe, I don't know, maybe all, maybe some, maybe one, but she died.
I wrote this last night in bed:
They say there is no coincidence and everything that happens in this world has a reason. I'm wavering between quantum mechanics and the certainty of Einstein.
Tonight, when I saw him after almost 3 weeks, before which, I hadn't really seen him for almost 6 months, it was for a movie, like those first days that we met. This time it was "The Great Gatsby", the man who built a mansion but instead "lived on a boat that looked like a house and was moved secretly up and down the Long Island Shore."1 He threw glamorous parties for five years, in the hope that the love of his life, Daisy, would come to the party and he would get back his past love.
When a cover of "Back to Black" was played at a party scene, I just closed my eyes behind those 3D glasses I was given to watch the film without knowing why the heck it was made in 3D. Why that song again? Why in all the songs on Earth, they had chosen that song to cover while I was sitting beside him in the theatre? That same song which was played on our first night out to Brutopia and we both said, "I love this song" after hearing the first few beats. That cold night in the end of January when we went out into the patio to smoke and a guy came and started a conversation about Freud and Jung because he wanted to talk to us and to finally get a cigarette from him. After I didn't see him, as if I had to be reminded of what didn't happen and what happened that he disappeared into thin air, I am obliged to listen to this song when I enter a shopping mall, a pharmacy, or worse than that, a bar. It is as if the random number of the shuffle algorithm that points to this song is calculated by the invisible scanners at the entrance of the place I step into, the scanners that pass their piercing eyes over me to scrutinize my body and its measurements to match it with a profile of ME, the same girl; It's her, play the song; play it loud and make it last longer by repeating the chorus; play it and let Amy Winehouse cry; play it and paralyze her for four minutes and one seconds; play it while she's in the line and can't get away; play it when her shopping cart is half full, she has an appointment in half an hour and she can't leave the supermarket; play it when she's having a good time in a bar and make her speechless for two hundred and forty one seconds; just play it, she will never have enough; she will never be overdosed, unlike the singer of this song.
Tonight, he didn't come to my place for a drink; he was dating someone and was being considerate! What the heck did he think, that I wanted to sleep with him?! I told him this to make sure he didn't assume anything. He didn't know that the song was played in the film; he didn't know... he just didn't know... He described himself best when I once told him that I thought he was mature enough to understand that my expressing my feelings towards him didn't come from a teenager. He replied: "I'm not mature, just old." Yes, I said to myself that night, remembering this. He's not mature enough to know that what goes around, comes around; to know that this world is constantly balancing itself. If there is a valley, there is a mountain. If there is richness here, there is poverty there. If you feel shitty now, you will be in the peak of joy another time. No one can get away with this ever present balance system that has governed our world.
May one day he be treated the same way he treated me. I think that's the fairest way of falling from his peak to maintain the balance.
I need an overdose and everything will be fine when the bubble magically bursts.
1-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925; New York; Scribner, 1995), p. 9.
