Take a look inside my heart

I made a new playlist for my iPod the other day.  I just needed something a bit upbeat and at the same time soothing, so I threw a few possibles at iTunes and then edited it down.  I ended up with quite a mixture of songs, including the following:

1) Solitude Standing - Suzanne Vega  

This song sounds determined, strong and yet, equally, sad.  It has an opening reminiscent of the beginning of the "Fraggle Rock"  theme, but then turns melancholic to the same extreme extent that  "Fraggle Rock" becomes almost nauseatingly chirpy.  (Though, don't get me wrong - I love Fraggle Rock.) The cyclical bell-like keyboard loop in this song is entrancing, almost hypnotic.  And everyone knows Suzanne Vega has the most haunting voice ever.  No-one else has come close to that timbre.  It's slightly unnerving to hear a voice like that sing something so dark.  When I know things aren't right but I need to keep going anyway, this is the perfect song.

2) Dub Be Good To Me - Beats International feat. Lindy Layton 

Because cheesy songs were necessary too.  And even this one has a dark side, a sort of lazy, humid summer vibe, circa 1990.  And for a very humid summer here in Prague, it's perfect.

3) Right Here, Right Now - Fatboy Slim  

Another track with energy but also a background of melancholy.  The strings do it for me everytime.  Travelling across town on the metro today, feeling shattered and isolated, (what I really mean is lonely) this was just what I needed.  Nothing like a song called 'Right Here, Right Now' to get you to at least try to enjoy living 'in the moment'.

4) Long Summer Days - EMF 

This is a little-known album track.  Yes, I had an EMF album.  (It was called 'Schubert Dip')  I love the crazy rock guitars and pointless background noise-like samples. You can sing the bassline, probably to 'na, na, na,' because the melody itself is irritatingly insistent.  It sounds desperate, hopeless and angry.  And Mancunian.

5) Ur Train - Leila (Arab) feat. Luca Santucci  

Like a metronome, this song beats time with a childlike harpsichord sound that runs throughout the main part of the song and makes you think of being on a conveyor belt, in some kind of toy factory made by lunatics.  I don't know, it's entrancing, the lyrics are about not being able to get away from someone you left and it just epitomised my jumbled up thoughts through my 5 hours' sleep haze this morning.

6) Good Luck - Basement Jaxx

This is so unlike me.  I don't normally listen to stuff like this.  The strong R'n'B vocals, the crazy pop sounds, the shuffley, trendy drum beat.  It's so not me.  And yet...  It somehow makes me feel better that I can pretend to be normal and conform by listening to this song and having someone in mind when I do so.  Does she really sing 'good luck in your new bed'?  I think so.  And that's exactly the thought I had to deal with.  

Knowing ex-partner was not only moving to a new country and a new home, and indeed, a new bed, but that his new partner had already taken my place in his bed before I knew about it was hard to cope with.  Was it inevitable that I would then get a text from him just as I was standing on the edge of the platform in a metro station today while listening to this on headphones?  And was it also inevitable that I would burst into tears at that moment too?  I guess so.

7) All I Wanna Do - Dannii Minogue

I don't want any disdainful tutting at this choice, ok?  I think we all like a bit of cheesy, totally pop, completely nonsensical upbeat music now and then, don't we?  And just because Dannii Minogue's worn a few dodgy outfits in her time and had a bad press all-round in comparison to her sister, is it really necessary to be ashamed of occasionally listening to songs she sang on?  If so, I don't care.  This song is stupid and dreamily silly but fun and even has a bit of rock guitar thrown in at the last minute, so it can't be all bad, right?  

In anycase, it's what I used to listen to when I first discovered the feeling that there might genuinely be hope that I could actually have a second relationship in my life after the drawn-out period of the break-up of the previous one.  I'm usually a total cynic, so it was nice to indulge in something quite the opposite.  (Mind you, the, 'I may not be the innocent girl that you wanted me to be', does still make me inwardly cringe.  Didn't Britney Spears sing something similar and equally fatuous?) 

So as Dannii sings, "take a look inside my heart, tell me what you think you see," my reply about me and my 'heart', I think, would be:  a jumbled up mess of despair, confusion, grief, annoyance and somewhere deep down in a place I rarely acknowledge or admit to, a trickle of unfounded optimism.

The metaphor remains the same

There was a distinct change in the air today.  The weather is hinting at what summer might bring, even before we've fully seen spring.  The scent of warmth greeted me as I walked in my flat.  That faint reminder of what the air is like when you don't need seven layers of clothing.  

I'm tracing my footsteps that brought me back from the brink.  How did I get as far as this?  The shift that occurred, and is still evolving between my old life and the one I now live, lies somewhere between the edge of the platform and the bookshop cafe back on Václavské Námĕstí.  I know I cannot take up residence in the bookshop cafe (hell, I haven't had the luxury of time to even go and have a coffee there) but the metaphor remains the same.  I was practically holding my head out over the tracks before, in the depths of winter that took hold so early in December and didn't stop till the beginning of February, but I seem to be on a tea-break now. 

Back in December I was listening incessantly to MC Solaar tracks, full of orchestral swells set against distorted guitar, followed by soaring but heart-wrenching BVs: "je veux partir d'ici, cette fois je te le dis, je ne veux plus de cette vie..emmenes-moi"  (roughly translated: "I want to leave, this time I'm telling you, I don't want anymore of this life, take me away")  And I remember trudging through slushy snow and being cold to the tip of my heart as much as my toes and barely being able to see somehow, it was all just too bleak.  I remember the fight against that grief, that searing cold front of emptiness and loss; the anguish, the sense of abandonment.  It was all there in the dark skies, the bitter cold, the barren surroundings and lifeless outlook.

And yet, in the days that followed the Bolero concert, there were moments of distraction, if not exactly hope.  And a few good conversations and even..laughter.  The day I walked back from my meet-ee's office, caught the metro and walked home, I listened to another track full of strings and guitars, but the line in it was "I just jumped out in the open, without knowing my parachute'll save me.  It's quiet and peaceful in this emotional nirvana blue."  And somehow I ended up at that Čajovna, a week or two later, hitting my principles against a brick wall because there was no escaping the fact that I knew I felt something and I also knew I couldn't go on without saying so.

But as we walked back, hand in hand through the late evening foggy streets of Prague I wondered what precise change had occurred? What did having someone's hand to hold really mean?  How was it that I had not had the conviction to hold his hand on the way there but on the way back, suddenly, I was walking with a fellow-traveller?  No longer an interested party, a new friend and flickering hope of an ally, but a companion.  A real and tangible one, walking with me.

As spring begins to grace us with her presence, or perhaps is merely hinting at her arrival in the fullness of time, I daren't hope for too much.  Perhaps, inspite of myself though, I shall savour the way it feels to be able to at least envisage the possibility of pleasure.  I shall trace the outline of the spectre of a future and delight in the comfort of being able to imagine if not the best, certainly the 'not-too-bad', whilst simultaneously preparing, as always and as every good English person should, for the worst.