warning: lore ahead
an ode, of sorts, to death cab (you knew it was coming)
Kintsugi. The Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the areas of breakage with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum. Kintsugi, or the art of creating something beautiful out of something tragic. Taking something broken and finding a new use for it. Kintsugi can give you a new perspective.
Kintsugi is also the name of Death Cab for Cutie’s eighth studio album, largely rumored to be about lead singer Ben Gibbard’s messy divorce from Zooey Deschanel. It is their second-lowest rated album on Pitchfork with a 5.5.
Kintsugi is not my favorite Death Cab for Cutie album; it might be top five. But the entire album is about Ben yearning for perspective and seeing what’s waiting for him on the other side.
“Everything’s a Ceiling,” the seventh track off the album, cracked my Spotify Wrapped this year.
Way way down a hole, there's no feeling Cuz when you're so far below the floor, everything's a ceiling
Perspective.
While I’m pretty sure Ben Gibbard might be an ego maniac, you can appreciate his song writing. It feels like the poetry I tried to write in eighth grade to describe feelings I was convinced no one else could ever understand.
But isn’t that exact feeling universal? Feeling alone, feeling like no one can relate to you? Doesn’t everyone go through that? When you’re down so bad, doesn’t getting up feel impossible? I love that lyric. When you’re standing tall, the ceiling doesn’t seem that far away. But laying on the floor, it might as well be in another universe.
Perspective.
I recently finished The Midnight Library by Matt Haig. It was something I read for my book club; I never picked it up when it was having its’ moment a few years back. If you don’t know the premise, proceed with caution, there are some spoilers here.
The protagonist of this story finds herself in a purgatory of sorts, a moment between life and death, where she is able to pick up a book and live every life she might have led if she made different choices.
She’s living parallel lives. There are millions and millions of versions of her living at the same exact time. She weaves in and out of them, noticing the pros and cons of every single life she might have ever dreamed of living.
The chorus of “Good Help (is so hard to find)”, off Kintsugi, goes like this:
There’s a long, slow fade To a darkened stage And I hear you say “Only a fool gives it away”
This song mirrors The Midnight Library; the protagonist of this book is depressed and burnt out. She wants to give up. But over time, she learns that if she never lived in the life she started in, people would end up suffering. She’s needed where she is. In the end, it takes her near death experience to find joy in her “root life.”
All of us take certain things for granted. A lot of the time, we’re so used to having things exist in familiar fashion, that we tend to under appreciate how special they are. Life can feel pretty mundane on a Thursday in January and I can tend to spiral. But why are we so critical of the normality? Why are we so hard on ourselves?
I struggle from what-if syndrome. I think it’s a pretty common phenomenon; how are we supposed to know if we’re making the right choices? If we’re in the right places? We simultaneously question everything we know. A good thing, perhaps, but a dangerous place to be when everything is seemingly going right.
I’m in a dogfight with my 25th year and I am constantly torn between what I think I’m supposed to be doing, what other people are doing, and what I WANT TO BE DOING. All those lines can blur together, so I’m trying to have some perspective.
I leave you with a snippet of “The Ghosts of Beverly Drive.”
So let us not be lonesome
Lost in between our needs and wants When there’s Kintsugi to be made, strive to make it.