Toothbrush / Trash

One of the things which never gets old about being a music fanatic (well, so far, at least) is how way can lead to way. You're reading a piece about a favorite artist and they mention some other artist, whom you've never even heard of before. And because we currently live in the age of miracles, you can just search for this new artist—the band Mount Eerie, which is apparently largely the work of Phil Elverum—and you discover he's been recording since the beginning of the century and you've just missed him. So you zip on over to YouTube and not only the song mentioned but indeed the entire album (2017's A Crow Looked at Me) is available, thanks to the artist himself. And you dive in and a bit later you hear a song and it just hits like a gosimer wrecking ball. 

And thanks to that websearch, you know that this album was not only written in the wake of his young wife's death but indeed in the room where she died, using her own instruments. 

Today I just felt it for the first time

Three months and one day after you died

I realized that these photographs we have of you

Are slowly replacing the subtle familiar

Memory of what it's like to know you're in the other room

To hear you singing on the stairs

A movement, a pine cone, your squeaking chair

The quite untreasured

In between times

The actual experience of you here

I can feel these memories escaping

Colonized by photos narrowed down and told my mind erasing

The echo of you in the house dies down

October wind blows

It makes a door close

I look over my shoulder to make sure

But there is nobody here

I finally took out the upstairs bathroom garbage that was sitting there forgotten since you were here

Wanting just to stay with us

Just to stay living

I threw it away

Your dried out, bloody, end-of-life tissues

Your toothbrush and your trash

And the fly buzzing around the room

Could that possibly be you too?

I let it go out the window

It does not feel good

I can't say I enjoy this song and yet at the same time I love it.