I have fallen in the forest. Did you hear me?
A love letter to Scott Hutchinson and the lyrics of Frightened Rabbit.
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.” James Baldwin
Or maybe someone sings. Sings to you, and even for you, and you suddenly know that you are not alone. Scott Hutchinson sang like that for me, and for thousands more like me too.
I have fallen in the forest. Did you hear me?
Yes, my friend, I heard you.
Yes, my friend, I still hear you.
Oh my beautiful friend I never had the pleasure to meet, I just wish you’d heard me too.
I heard your “I’m away now. Thanks” from one end of the country to the other and I knew it wasn’t a jaunty Scottish ‘see you soon’. I hoped that it wasn’t a real and final goodbye. I hoped it was just…
A scream
to prove
to everyone
that I exist.
Because I heard that scream of proof — a proof of life — a thousand times. I’ve sung it and yelled it and whispered it too. You sang it for me and for thousands more like us, and we sang it back to you every night you finished a show, often long after you and your brothers had left the stage. Voices chanting a wordless euphoric melancholy, echoing your defiance against being alone, back to you. There’s no loneliness in a scream when hundreds of you are singing it together. Singing it with you and for you.
Like me, hundreds of friends you’d never met replied to your ‘I’m away now’ hoping you’d hear us, hoping you’d know that we heard you too. We wanted you to hear that you were heard so it would make the difference to persuade you not to go where we dreaded to think you were going. We were hoping that you’d understand that your screams…
To fill a thousand black balloons with air
…were heard and understood and were shared, and we all hoped that you’d feel the outpouring and understand that you mattered to us so much too. We hoped you’d turn around, walk back off the bridge and find us, or just one of us, and hear us face to face. We all prayed to our own interventionist gods not harm a hair on your head, to leave you as you are and to direct you into our arms.
Luke Sital-Singh says that sad songs are the most powerful songs because they combine two of the most human of connectors — pain and music — and I know you’d understand his rationale. No one gets out of life without knowing the bitter sting of tears, but we all know that joy of music that lifts us and carries us soaring above and beyond the pain. We are your friends because the words of your songs had connected us in a mighty embrace, binding us all together in a shared yawp that screamed the pain away, and that’s a powerful gift you gave all your friends. It’s a strong medicine for a dark disease.
Am I here?
Of course I am, yes.
All I need is your hand
to drag me out again.
The first song of yours I heard was The Loneliness And The Scream and it caught me when I was falling. I don’t know how deep I was tumbling but it helped drag me out again. The music and the pain combined and connected with me. Your music and my pain found each other, and it suddenly it all mattered and it all made sense.
I have fallen in the forest
Did you hear me?
So I’ll say it again my friend. Yes, I heard you and it felt like you sang it because you heard me saying ‘am I here?’, lost and unable to see the woods from these trees. I don’t pretend to understand that existential question of if a tree falls in the forest does anyone hear it, but in this song it’s just a clear metaphor that I do understand perfectly. You can feel so alone and so unheard, even when you are surrounded by your own kind. But of course, the trees do hear and the dark blue truth is that depression makes us think that we are unnoticed and that no-one else can understand, when that’s not true at all. We all know pain and grief and heart-break. We’re all part of a forest, tangling our roots together. Forests are a symbiotic ecosystems that feed off each other and support each other and nurture each other to thrive and grow. We humans do see each other, and do hear each other, and we hold each other up and drag each other up, and it’s the nastiest disease that allows our minds to think otherwise.
That disease made you wrong to think that…
These words are meant for nothing
These thoughts won’t change the clocks
…because your heart was right when it sang that….
Hope is born of hopelessness
It might have felt pointless to write and to sing of your pain, and maybe it wasn’t cathartic enough for you, but I always found hope from your songs of hopelessness. The sun always shines a few rays brighter after the storm has passed. Everyone feels better after a good cry.
Are they tears or is it rain?
Doesn’t matter anymore
In the end they’re both the same
We’re less filthy than before
When your brother raised the alarm last Wednesday morning, warning that you were in a fragile state, I burst into tears and the tears didn’t stop coming. And it rained all day.
I typed my message to you, hoping that you’d read the outpouring of unconditional love for you on Twitter, not knowing that you’d left your phone behind. Probably on purpose. The Black Dog didn’t want you to see our love that might have saved you from its jaws.
We all hoped and prayed that by writing and singing the words of Floating in the Forth you’d found a clever way to dodge your own prophecy. I guess we hoped that by singing…
I think I’ll save suicide for another year
…and by having us sing that line back to you, you’d found a powerful catharsis that would always keep you at least two steps back from the edge. We hoped that you’d just find your way safely to the Northern side and the ‘Fife of mine and a boat in the port for me.’ That bloody song. That dark, horrific song that is so, so achingly beautiful with its gently Caledonian harmonies of…
I float away
I’ll float away
Down the Forth
into the sea
It was supposed to be about imagining the act, and by singing it out loud and singing it together it was supposed to be a lifebelt or a Samaritan, to prevent you from ever having to do it. Let the song carry the weight. Let the words carry the thoughts away and into the sea, not you. Not you my beautiful friend I never knew.
Because I knew we would have been friends. Fuck it Scott. You are my friend, and always will be. I hope some divine hand that you didn’t believe in, has lifted you up out of the forest where you fell. I hope you’ve found your house in the clouds and that it’s painted in a colour you love to remind you that you’re still very much alive. I hope that you will rest knowing that while you were alive you made huge changes to our earth.
I hope that it’s a peaceful and kind place and all the pain has floated away.
Down the Forth
Into the sea.
Scott I hope that you know, now that you’re gone, something special carries on. Me. And thousands like me who you touched and who heard you. So thank you my friend I never knew. Thank you, and you have indeed made tiny changes to earth. Mark my words, while I’m alive, I’ll make tiny changes to earth too.
