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Summer into winter: Starlet’s When Sun Falls On My Feet
"Why can’t I just stop and let it go?"
As he walked the dark, snow-covered streets of a town in the
northern part of the country at six in the morning, a town he
had never been in before, he listened to the album in his headphones,
sinking yet again into the feeling. He had done this in several
towns, at various times of day and night, during that fall and
early winter. He had always found a strange, soothing kind of
feeling in the songs. He felt tired and lonely, but the songs
made him feel fine with that. As he turned a corner the great
big lake in the town came into full view. The lights on the
other side spread out as stars on the ground. Smoke pumped from
the chimneys of some kind of factory--the only sign of life.
He took his camera out, snapped a photograph, to try to capture
the stillness. He lingered there for a minute, drawing deep
breaths of freezing, clean air into his lungs.
"I know I will never be able to keep these things at a
distance"
Lying on a sun-baked patch of grass, in the middle of a town
in the very south of the country, in the very middle of summer.
Ice cream, laughter, and smiles. And the feeling--the knowledge--that
this would all be over very soon.
"Don’t you bring all that up, it’s ancient history,
Take aim at tomorrow, and don’t stay in all day,
The sun is up, it’s beautiful"
At the same time the songs brought with them a kind of inspiration--the
sort of inspiration that comes with an unexpected turn of events.
He was at a point in his life where choices had to be made.
The future lay blank ahead of him; he was afraid. But when he
listened to the songs on that album while walking along those
streets, his breath a fog in front of him, he felt confident
that things would be fine.
"Don’t look back, carry on"
They didn’t argue. They never had. They just spoke softly
into the night of the way they didn’t seem to fit any longer.
Of how they had felt they’d been important in each other’s
lives before… that summer, that spring. Of the day when
they ran in the driving rain, ran to go swimming, lightning
flashing across the skies, both of them soaking wet, clothes
clinging as they turned back, jumping onto the tram, still laughing.
Looking, holding. She said she wouldn’t want them to tire
of each other completely.
"Sure I do forgive you,
but how will I forget?"
As he continued through the centre of town looking for the train
station, he was surprised to see several people standing at
the bus stop. He figured earlier departure times came with the
greater distances up north. They all stared at him as he strode
past, perhaps because he was singing the words silently to himself.
His lips slightly moving and the urgency of those words causing
him to pick up the pace defiantly and decidedly. And his heart
was racing.
"You’ve got to have faith in yourself,
Don’t give up, just work really hard"
He had been on a train trip with her one summer. During a lengthier
stop in an unknown town they had wandered off and found a small
pond surrounded by grass. They had laid down there to watch
ducks play. And even though it was a grey cloudy dull day, he
could see the tiny, tiny hairs on her nose oh so clearly as
she lay there in the grass, closing her eyes, gently smiling.
"Not alone,
Not alone,
Not alone,
Not alone,
(oooh-oooh-oooh)"
Opposite the train station was a petrol station open twenty-four
hours a day. He went in there for the morning paper and a cup
of hot chocolate to warm his hands. The girl behind the counter
looked up from the magazine she’d been reading to raise
an eyebrow at him. As he paid her he had to take one headphone
out, allowing a disturbing few seconds of reality into the song.
He tried to shut her voice out as he crossed the road and sat
down in the empty train station, glancing at the big clock on
the wall. It was another two hours until his train was to leave.
He wished it never would.
"Tell me more brilliant ideas,
You and me against the world,
What’s to fear?
There’s nothing really,
It’s just life I fear"
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