Solitude Sometimes Is

Am listening to Lifeblood by the Manic Street Preachers and it feels very much like my heart is breaking. It's during moments like these that I think I'm only pretending to be a writer, that I won't really be a writer until I can set down in words how a song and a memory can fill one up with such bittersweetness, such intense yet imprecise longing. "1985" plays, and I feel transported to my pre-teenhood and at the same time rooted here: a muddle of innocent ignorance and cynical self-awareness, romantic and idiotic, clueless and knowing, neither now nor then, possibilities spinning in the air but mistakes already made, years already done and gone. Keyboard-conjured notes ring and echo as James Dean Bradfield sings about "Empty Souls," and I think of lost chances and lives in fast-forward. Listening to "I Live To Fall Asleep" almost makes me want to cry; instead, I raise a squiggle-smile of intermingled affection and regret. "Glasnost" fills me with a hope both irrational and fleeting, yet recurring, if that makes any sense. Understand that I'm not even really trying to make the lyrics out -- though I'm sure that they're good -- it's just the way these songs sound that affects me so. And I know they won't -- can't -- make everyone feel the same way, or even close to the same way. It helps to have grown up in the 80s. It helps to be a little over-sensitive and self-centered, to be prone to bouts of nostalgia and daydreaming. It helps to be me, I guess.