“If I had to sum up what he did to me, I’d say it was this: he made me sing along to all the bad songs on the radio. Both when he loved me and when he didn’t.”
– Jenny Offill, Dept. of Speculation

Ten years ago, almost to the day, on a deserted platform, somewhere on—or on some side of—the Dutch-German border. Train tracks, gleaming in the moonlight, leading… Forests, deeply opaque. Limpid air; smells of pine and cold and soil. It has rained.

Above, endless stars, endless black. Fear of falling in. Fear of… infinity, uncertainty, the dark, the next minute. Fear is the coldest sensation. Loneliness is second. Two friends. Two backpacks. One pair of earphones.

Nothing else to do: hit play.

When the world was born, “a rough sound was polished until it became a smoother sound, which was polished until it became music.” A mix CD. Track One:

“So no one told you life was gonna be this way…”

No, no one had. Ten years, countless mistakes on, still hasn’t.

Track Two: Love me, fool me. Track Three: A big jet plane. It’s a wild world. Mad World. Where do you go to, my lovely? Let’s start a band. Love you till the end.

It’s gonna be all right. You can stand under my umbrella. I’ll buy you the flower shop, and you will never be lonely. Here comes the sun…

The song was right.

Two thousand six hundred years ago, ish, the first love song was born; a woman wrote then sang a poem, not to a god, emperor, nation, or notion, but to another person:

Love shook my heart.

You burn me.

Remembering those things
We did in our youth…
…Many, beautiful things…

Sappho broke the rules of Western music and gave the world the right to use sacred singing to tell its own truths. No longer just the realm of priests and mystics, songs exploded into a universe of “feeling-tones that reach beyond words to touch us, to transform us, to feed energy back and forth in ineffable ways.”

It’s gonna be all right. Here comes the sun.

Turu turu. The sun did.

Song tracks, train tracks. Right or wrong tracks, stations. Sometimes, wrong trains. Whole journeys; wrong destinations, companions, tickets. Lost luggage and ways and friends and time—no, not time, ever. One of Sappho’s most heartbreakingly true fragments says:

Rejoice, go and
remember me
[…] and beautiful times we had.

In cars, on trains, Ferris wheels, balconies, sidewalks, seashores, on old French vinyls, mix tapes and CDs, weeping on beds, videos, and phones. “It is possible to grow disdainful of love songs […] but never to entirely forget what it was to hear truth in banal pop lyrics.” Ten years ago, we believed in “delirium, delight, youth, sunshine, love letters.” Fools we were then, are still, proudly. Survival. The other day, I heard that track, thought of you, and sang alone in the street.