Here’s Where the Story Ends — The Sundays
#365Songs: February 10
It’s still FUCKING 90s WEEK on #365Songs and no 90s CD changer of mine would be complete without The Sunday’s Reading, Writing and Arithmetic (1990).
I’ve only met one person that was more in love with The Sundays than me — a girl I dated briefly in college and I think I dated her because she liked The Sundays.
I’ve been in worse relationships. Naturally, it lasted a couple weeks. It left me fractured, though, oddly not because I really liked her.
… People I see, weary of me
Showing my good side
I can see how people look down
I’m on the outside… Here’s where the story ends
Ooh, here’s where the story ends
Harriet Wheeler became the voice of the broken Self. Harriet Wheeler, manic pixie dream librarian, patron saint of doomed relationships. Still, those that are blind to doomed relationships are still shattered. I didn’t need the relationship — at the time I needed the confidence to find a place in my new Self. In a new city. A new world. To become a new me, the kind of me that I wanted other people to see. And also maybe the me that I hoped to be.
… It’s that little souvenir of a terrible year
Which makes my eyes feel sore
Oh, I never should have said the books that you read
Were all I loved you for
It’s that little souvenir of a terrible year
Which makes me wonder why
It’s the memories of your shed that make me turn red
Surprise, surprise, surprise
“This is Where the Story Ends” is the most Sundays song. It’s also their most popular. I went looking for another I would pick over it, but I couldn’t. The lyric “I never should have said the books that you read / Were all I loved you for” has simmered in my brain for thirty years. Replace “books” with “Sundays CDs.” It’s funny. The details about people, the details about songs that stay.
I don’t remember her last name, but I remember The Sundays.
A lyric. A look. A hook. The jangling guitars and peppy alt-pop facade glossing over the melancholy. The eventual commingling of the destructive break and the recovery, the future — my current reality — that came from its wake.
… It’s that little souvenir of a colorful year
Which makes me smile inside
So I cynically, cynically say the world is that way
Surprise, surprise, surprise, surprise, surprise… Here’s where the story ends
Ooh, here’s where the story ends
Here is where the story ends. The next story begins. We hope we’ve learned. We hope it’s better, but we keep the souvenirs, the memories, the baggage, The Sundays, and we have the option of surprising ourself by not learning, by doing it all over again.
Because we are just that way. Struggling to be Me.
~
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