And I said, "Where can I put it all down?"

Re: the 2007 Aqualung album Memory Man, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and the weight of memory

Note: I wrote this back in March, but it needed some time to cool on the rack.

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“You remember too much,
my mother said to me recently.
Why hold onto all that? And I said,
Where can I put it down?”

–Anne Carson

In 2007, I was browsing my friend’s CD collection. I picked out, as I so often had, a few CDs to borrow and burn. One of them was Memory Man by Aqualung, an artist our mutual friend had put us both onto.

When the wall of drums and electric guitars hit 13 seconds in on the first track, “Cinderella,” I remember feeling a little disoriented. This wasn’t the woozy, sleepy piano pop of Strange and Beautiful, the first Aqualung album I’d listened to. Strange and Beautiful can be pretty well summed up as Grey’s Anatomy music (complimentary, to an extent). No, Memory Man immediately felt darker and more tragic, and it quickly became one of my teenage staples. I was in love with the owner of the CD, and he was dating somebody else. The album felt like it fit, because I thought I knew sadness. 

These days, I never hear anybody talk about Aqualung, the one-man project of British songwriter Matt Hales. A part of me understands: musically, his wistful voice and pop-rock arrangements are nothing revolutionary. But there’s another part of me—aglow with grief and love in the dusk of my life—that still finds these songs extraordinary.

The second track, “Pressure Suit,” was the first to truly capture my attention. It’s about feeling distant from someone, perhaps because they’re not meeting you halfway. “Two spinning spheres, we spin together, and we spin alone,” he sings at the song’s beginning and again before the bridge. The bridge where he chants, “I can’t stop loving you,” over and over again—ten times, I counted. “Somewhere underneath your pointed tongue and teeth is where you really are,” he says amidst U2-esque guitar tones that eventually wind back down to just his piano. To see something in someone that they cannot see themselves: to die a little death every time they betray your vision. To love, alone. To grasp at the impossible past. It’s the burden of the memory-keeper.

My favorite song off the album, when I first started listening, was the fourth track, “Glimmer.” In my loneliest teenage moments, I’d steep in the song’s lullaby-like cadence and hope-fraught lyrics:

There’s a mirror in the old place
The place we used to stand
And wonder at our sweet, sweet selves,
Smiling hand in hand
This wasn’t what we planned

Though the night has fallen
I close my eyes and imagine
A tiny glimmer
Flickering on the horizon

Now, at 32, I’m drenched in memory, like clothes made heavy by a downpour. The weight of all I’ve lost wounds me over and over until I feel like I’ll die. C.S. Lewis said of grief, “The same leg is cut off time after time.” “I had a whole other life, you know,” I have to bite my tongue from saying to every new person I meet. A life where I had a little freedom, a little love, a little apartment of my own. I was married, I find myself compulsively explaining. I lost my job and all my money. I had a dog who died of old age. I left behind a peony plant without knowing if it would ever bloom again.

A razor-thin violin sends the melody up into the atmosphere above the second chorus and bridge. With its ascent into the last chorus, the sun seems to rise for a moment, until he starts to ask “Can you see it?” See what? Oh. See what. It isn’t there, it was just a dream, and it’s still night. The violin arches for one last tragic note, as high and as quiet as the song goes. The glimmer is gone now. But that doesn’t negate the fact that we saw, that we felt it for a moment. 

Listening to this album feels like lingering in the edges of a dream, wandering a house that I no longer have the key to. This is where we set up the Christmas tree. This is where we watched LOST. My Penny, my constant. It’s easy to get lost in the mirrored hallways—the impossible past—forgetting, for just a moment, all the cruelty that justified moving out.

March 19, 2024 was the 20th release anniversary of the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. In it, a broken-up couple opt to erase all memories of their relationship (because there’s like, a way to do that in the movie) and end up walking back through all the vanishing moments one more time right before they fade. It’s a movie about the exchange rate for pain: you’ve lost, and now you might be able to mitigate the sorrow of that loss. So what’s the downside?

“Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better even of their blunders,” quips Kirsten Dunst’s peripheral character in the movie. But by the end of the film, it’s not so clear if she’s wrong or right. 

The fifth track of Memory Man, “Vapour Trail,” softens the blow of “Glimmer” with a wandering time signature and wistful guitar plucking that escalates in the chorus. A lot of the songs on this record read like Keane or perhaps a slightly more muted Snow Patrol—part of a moment in mid-2000s British rock that was particularly radio-friendly, but not yet soulless. It’s the kind of thing that the era’s critics scoffed at, but, if you grew up with it, very likely taught you how to feel.

Throughout the album, Hale’s staccato piano keys feel like a fluttering heartbeat, like the winter thawing. He’s a piano guy first and foremost, setting drums and guitars on top of what are, at their core, piano songs. But what I love about Memory Man, compared to the other Aqualung albums I’ve listened to, is that the keys are just the bones. The uncertainty of “Something To Believe In” builds and then breaks into a flurry of major chords for a moment in the chorus, and then winds itself back up into a frenzy of hope and desperation. “Black Hole,” the album’s eighth track, throws distorted piano up like paint on a wall behind a manic drum machine. Where does the time go? Where does the love go? These are questions that demand to be answered with layers of production, rhythm, and gravity.

Black holes bend time, devour it, in a way that none of us understand. At least I don’t. I know there’s something about them being heavy, or things that enter them getting heavier, maybe. The weight of the darkness is crushing when you used to know light and warmth.

You say I’m a black hole, 
a singularity
An old supernova, 
a blazing blind catastrophe,
Oh but once I was a star
And a long time before that, 
somebody’s sun

It’s strange to think about the different kind of sadness I once felt as a teenager listening to the songs on Memory Man. I gravitated toward the more urgent-feeling, pop-leaning tracks: “Glimmer,” “Rolls So Deep,” “Outside.” Just recently, I revisited a track I used to always skip, “Garden of Love.” It clocks in at almost 6 minutes; something I wouldn’t have had the patience for at 16, but now don’t mind. 

“So we pushed and we pulled with our nerves of steel / You had the pedals and I had the wheel / and the terrible truth is we never knew where we were going,” someone who’s not Hale sings, and his voice is so grand and compelling that it momentarily stops my heart. Google says it’s Paul Buchanan, the late frontman of Scottish alt-pop band The Blue Nile. I once knew someone who joked that every time he’d Shazam a good song, it ended up being The Blue Nile. We were in our ambient-pop era then. One of countless rooms I’m locked out of but, paradoxically, can’t leave behind.

I have a friend who loves that Anne Carson quote as much as I do—the one about “where can I put it all down.” He’s lived just as many lives as me, and more: family rifts, severed ties with religion, a desperate attempt to make a marriage work. When he was in the thick of his former marriage, still deeply Evangelical, he once took a hiking pilgrimage with a huge rock in a backpack, because he thought that carrying it would somehow absolve him of his struggles. I learned this because he still had the rock in his room when I met him.

Letting go isn’t how people think it is. You can’t just erase a memory. You’ll be somewhere normal, at a soccer match, for example, and then all the sudden the black hole opens up and you’re somewhere else. You’re a portal, a conduit for the very thing you’re supposed to heal from. The lights are blaring and people are cheering and you’ve lost so much that you still somehow cling to. And I know I need to open my hand and loosen my grip, but despite the water rising, I’m finding that I can’t let go just yet.

On April 2, 2022, I had written in my little email newsletter about my life traveling the country in a camper, a life that seems fantastically foreign to me now:

Today, on the verge of tears, I told him that I just wish I had more time---but for what? To delay the inevitable?

It's just that the world is so scary right now. And this little bubble we've created for ourselves here in North Carolina this winter has felt so safe. 

There's this song, this album, that I liked in late high school; it's not cool, or anything that I'd expect anyone here to know or care about, but it's been playing in my head the past couple of days.

This is a story about the three of us
Down by the water and the tide keeps rising

This world is burning and I'm terrified
I need a little more time with you

Oh I just need a little more time with you

I've never known specifically what it's about, but it's always been with me during the rare moment when all I could think of to do was wish for a little more time exactly where I was. I'd play it on piano over and over and over.

I just need a little more time. I'm not ready.

I'm sorry. I'll write something funny or hopeful soon. I just need a little time. Just a little more time. 

I originally used to skip Memory Man’s final song, the one I quoted in the email, until I carelessly left it on one day in college and struck what felt like gold. “Broken Bones” is slow to start, with a weird quiet intro that sounds like it’s wafting out of an old tape player. The whole first verse is nearly a whisper, the chorus easing in on piano chords:

This is a story about the three of us
Down by the water and the tide is rising

“Who’s ‘the three of us?’” one of my newsletter readers asked at the time. “I don’t know,” I answered truthfully. We lost our dog Richie almost exactly two months later, and our marriage a year after that. I never gave the Memory Man CD back. The mutual friend who’d introduced us both to Aqualung has been dead for almost 13 years. The same limb severed again and again, and not once have I ever been ready.

This world is burning and I'm terrified
I need a little more time with you
Oh I just need a little more time with you
Oh please just a little more time with you

In the last scene of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the two main characters are talking in a house that’s gradually disintegrating. It’s their final remaining memory together, one that’s on the verge of being erased, and despite being initially so sure that they wanted this fresh start, they’re now fraught with grief and panic. Perhaps they are not so panicked about losing a real, present relationship as they are about losing the years of memories. Please, just a little more time. I know I have to let go, but I need a little more time. Heavy as it may be, I am not quite ready to put it down.