A Rush of Blood to the Head

2003 was a year that changed me forever.  For so many reasons and in so many ways I cannot even begin to list them or explain them fully.  In 2003 I was the wife of an Army officer.  In January of that year he deployed to Kuwait.  We had been married for just 10 months.  I was also still coming out of one of the scariest and darkest times of my life.  A time when I had no direction and no desire for direction.  A time when I just did. not. care. about anything anymore.  I time when I was just a shell of a person.  It had been about a year at that point since I had begun climbing out of that dark, cold place, but I wasn’t completely done climbing yet.

Those 2 very big things converged at the beginning of 2003.  I was alone, but not.  I had family near.  I lived in an apartment with my younger sister.  My parents were across town, my in-laws were in the next town over.  I had support, but in ways I can’t explain I was alone.  2003 was make or break for me and I knew it.

It was at that time that I bought this CD and it became the soundtrack of my 2003.  I listened to it incessantly.  Through the magic/technology of Pandora I heard a song from that CD a week or 2 ago.  I had to find that CD again.  I didn’t own it anymore.  It was left behind, like so many other things, when Lee and I divorced.  I downloaded it from iTunes & burned it onto a CD (leaving one of my favorite songs out…thanks Daddy for remedying that!)  for my trip (alone!) to my parents’ house this weekend.  I left Friday night, it was rainy and windy.  It was an awful drive!  But I had that CD and about 45 minutes into my drive I put it in…Suddenly all those memories flooded back.  Just as fresh as if it had all happened yesterday.  All the uncertainty of having my new husband on the front lines of a war…with no communication at all from him for weeks at a time.  The fear of a knock at the door or a late night phone call.  The starkness of that reality.  The way I somehow held it all together even though I was convinced I would never be able to.  How I finally realized I was not as weak as I thought I was.  When I, for the first time in my life, was ok being alone.  It’s amazing to me sometimes how much I tie my emotions in with certain music.  The funny thing is, as I listened to the CD, like I said…I remembered how life  felt in 2003.  Exactly…every emotional detail.  I know how I felt the lyrics to certain songs then, what I related the lyrics to, but now I relate them to different things.  And they are every bit as powerful to me, they’re true to me still.  I love that I have this sort of emotional time capsule in musical form.  Honestly, I’m sure I have many of them, but this one stands out simply because of the time it’s tied to.

There are a few songs in particular that really say it all for me…a song called The Scientist in particular.  In fact, it’s actually so much more true to me now.   But now it’s a different relationship.  My marriage now and parenthood.  Parenthood, parenthood, parenthood…Nobody said it was easy.  No one ever said it would be this hard. As I listened to that song Friday night, driving through the rain, after my initial 2003 thoughts, I thought about the first 6 months of Anna’s life.  I didn’t think my marriage was going to make it.  I was thisclose to just giving up on it.  I remember going to visit my mom for a couple days with Anna when she was just a couple months old.  My dad traveled a lot at the time then and I wasn’t working, so I just went to keep my mom company in the evenings…or that’s why I told myself I was going.  I ended up staying for almost a week.  I didn’t intend to stay that long.  I just didn’t want to go home.  I didn’t want to deal with Mark…or rather with my relationship with Mark.  I was so done.  After 4 or 5 days…Mark finally asked when I was coming home, he said he missed me and he missed Anna.  There was just something different in his voice that made me go back home.  Maybe he knew it was a breaking point.  I don’t know that we’ve ever even talked about it, but it was one of those make or break times.  Obviously we worked it out somehow…but it’s that little something in Mark’s voice that night in the summer of 2008 that I hear when I hear this:

Nobody said it was easy
It’s such a shame for us to part
Nobody said it was easy
No one ever said it would be this hard
Oh, take me back to the start

The fact that the title is The Scientist is just an added bonus.  I guess you’d need to know Mark well to get just how perfect that is. Or maybe it’s just perfect to me…

There are 2 other songs I love…one being the title track, the other called Amsterdam.  The darkness of these 2 songs appealed to me at the time…it’s appeal is a little more limited now.  But I know why I liked the songs so much then and I still like them now.  Sometimes I forget about everything I went through in my early 20’s (i.e. – the dark hole I was still climbing out of in 2003).  Of course, I never truly forget, but maybe I don’t always give it the weight it deserves.  Sometimes I need to remember just so I can feel the contrast between then and now.   A little excerpt from Amsterdam just for the purpose of illustration – I know I’m dead on the surface, but I am screaming underneath (seriously, there is no better illustration than that, but moving on a verse or 2)…You can say what you mean, but it won’t change a thing, I’m sick of the secrets.  Stood on the edge, tied to a noose and you came along and you cut me loose. I cannot tell you how much that describes that period of my life, not in a totally literal sense, but still, in a very real (sad but true) sense.

The title track, A Rush of Blood to the Head, was the one Pandora randomly threw out there a couple weeks ago.  I won’t go all in-depth with this one.  The song is about moving forward…leaving behind a troubling place or, in my case, a troubling time.  It’s all one big metaphor to me.  And I know the mistakes that I’ve made.  See it all disappear without a trace…And they call as they beckon you on, they say start as you need to go on.

I can’t believe I just wrote a whole blog post based on a Coldplay album, but…well I did.  That CD made my 3 hour drive interesting and it made me think about things I haven’t thought about in a long time.  That music defines that year for me, but it also defines the changes that took place in me.  In a lot of ways those lyrics were cathartic at the time, but some parts also acted as catalysts to keep me moving forward at a very critical time.  It still stands out as relevant to me now though…maybe because it’s ingrained in my history, maybe because it speaks to experiences I’ve had in the years since.  For whatever reason I love it and I’m glad to have these reminders of where I’ve been and how far I’ve come…in musical form.