Awaiting Thursday Afternoon
Thursday Afternoon is a song that is 1 hour and 50 seconds long. I found it beautiful the first few times I heard it but difficult to listen to past the 20, even the 5 minute mark. The fact that it was an entire hour long was also somehow hilarious to me. Sometimes songs just stew around in your library for weeks, and then one morning you wake up with a few notes of a melody or a single lyric in your mind and you think about it all day wondering what it is. What is it what is it what is it. Finally you hold the song in your mind long enough to figure it out. Relief! Confusion! Oh it's that song? Strange didn't think I liked it. Poof – moment's happened; song is now yours. To have and to hold dearly.
This moment came for Thursday Afternoon about week ago when I was cycling from my first therapy appointment. The sky was very grey, about to start raining all over myself and my favorite coat, a coat I had spent four weeks working for so that I could afford. I cycled a bit in this gloom and the sky broke open and I knew I was done for. To cheer myself up, I ducked into Ekoplaza and quite tenderly considered the merits of buying courgette over cauliflower.
I haven’t touched either courgette in my fridge since, but I spent the rest of that afternoon listening to Thursday Afternoon over and over again. In the HEMA, in my now-ruined coat, the email "Classes are cancelled for the rest of the semester”. On the bike-ride home, still, over and over and over, feeling like I’m balancing my life like a little girl playing with a fragile glass marble rolling it around her palm wondering whether it will drop. This marble is slightly pink, just like the album cover.
Thursday Afternoon is a good song to slowly roll a marble around your palm with. By this time, it had become the only song that day that could bring me any comfort. Goodnight.
