Saturday, December 14, 2013

In a place where we only say goodbye


I have discussed Death Cab for Cutie before, so if you want to check out my little biography of them look at my post for The Ice Is Getting Thinner.
What Sarah Said has been a favorite song of mine for some time. I first heard it when I was in eighth grade. I had been having a rough time with kids at school and was extremely depressed. I’m sure you can all speculate my mental state at this time after listening to this song. Around sophomore year I decided I disliked the direction my life was going in and that my family didn’t need to be in the waiting room wondering if I was alive. Whenever I feel weak, I listen to this song and remind myself of the dangers of returning to old habits.
“And it came to me then, that every plan is a tiny prayer to father time. As I stared at my shoes, in the ICU that reeked of piss and 409.” Gibbard sets the scene of being in a ruddy little waiting room, the reek of harsh cleaning products (409 is a disinfecting cleaner, in case you didn’t know). Clearly the situation is dire, because he is in the waiting room for the Intensive Care Unit at a hospital, usually meaning the patient is either dead, dying, or somewhere in between. Not a happy place to be. “I rationed my breaths, as I said to myself, that ‘I’ve already taken too much today’. As each descending peak on the LCD took you a little farther away from me…” Gibbard at this time was a raging alcoholic, which makes this situation seem even worse. My first thought was maybe he was drinking and was in a car accident, but now I think something completely different. Obviously the person he’s concerned about isn’t doing stellar, because the heart monitor screen is slowly falling…
                “Amongst the vending machines and year-old magazines, in place where we only say goodbye. It stung like a violent wind that our memories depend on a faulty camera in our minds.” I have a family in very poor health, and I wish I could remove every memory of a nurse walking in and being terrified that the person currently ill had died. I would pray that the nurse would go to some other poor Joe in the room and tell them their bad news. That my person had lived and theirs died- what a selfish thought to have.
                Later in the song I pieced together that this person was in the hospital for a suicide attempt, and in the music video this is only more painful. In the music video the girl seems to be invisible to her lover, because she’s dead. He is thinking of all the things he could have done to help her and she doesn’t understand why he is ignoring her (or at least that’s how I deciphered the video). It’s heart breaking. When she writes on the mirror, her hand, her arm, etc. she is playing the game of he loves me/ he loves me not.
Il m'aime: He loves me.
On her hand, "un peu?" is "a little bit."
On the walls, "beaucoup?" is "a lot."
On her arm, "passionaïément" is passionately. On her leg, "à la foue" is "to madness."
And then in the end, "il m'aime pas du tout" is "he doesn't love me anymore."

Here’s the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I483tB12SyE

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