True Love Waits

Radiohead released A Moon Shaped Pool.

It’s gorgeous and I’m still letting it wash over me, but the last track is True Love Waits which is a moody song from deep in their history. They’ve been playing it since 1995, but had never put out a studio recording until now.

The lyrics and mood of this track just brings me to tears at this time in my life, just about six months past the most cosmic shift in my life since I was born.

I’m not living, I’m just killing time.

True love waits in haunted attics.

Just don’t leave. Don’t leave.

There is nothing I can give or take. I can’t cut off my arms. I can’t become a good enough person, or accomplish something grand enough. There’s no spell, no conjuration, no incantation. There’s nothing that can bring my dad back.

There is only a song here, a smell there, a picture here, a memory there that can bring back a reminiscence, an odor, a ghost. But never the real thing. Never the full flesh and incarnate reality of my dad.

Me and my family can embody echoes of him. We can occasionally sound like him. Or think like him. Or any of the infinite, small aspects of his imprint on us.

But he is gone.

And this mournful state is just what I am right now. It’s not for a purpose. There is nothing to accomplish. There is nowhere to go. Not a thing to do. I just am.

True love waits. True love lives.

Don’t leave.