Fear Of Being Okay

Inviting people into my life is to build a little place for them in my heart to enjoy together whenever they’re home. We collaboratively form it in their shape, and fill it with beautiful memories; we craft our own world with it’s own rules and language and songs. But then eventually — (or I guess inevitably) — there’ll be a day they no longer visit. When that happens, what’s left within me is a bittersweet negative space, a mouldform imprinted with their unique ways of being, their shades of emotion, and every future we never lived out.

It aches in that place when someone’s not around anymore, whether it’s a friend, or a romantic partner, or a loved one who has passed away. The home calls out for the sound of familiar footsteps, but lies dormant. The furniture gathers dust and there is a quiet, agonising stillness to a place that used to move and shift and flow. I don’t know about you, but it takes me a while to stop trying to visit those rooms.

This is the lived etymology of nostalgia — nostos (return home) + algos (pain) — oh, how it hurts to seek what once was.

At the same time as it’s painful to seek those old echoes, it’s so hard to be away from. Travelling across that threshold feels wrong. Leaving the front gate and into the unknown feels hollow and pointless. What could possibly feel like that again? And there’s truth in that — you will probably never be dipped in that specific sweet love again, it’s been and gone, like a beautiful glowing sunset lost to tangible memory but nourishing for the soul. If you’re lucky, maybe it will come back through your life regularly like a comet, and you’ll find a way to appreciate what you have while it shines in your sky. More likely though, this will be another indescribable moment, uncapturable, ungraspable. That’s what real is.

If you can summon up the courage to wander out the door and into the world again, you will notice the world feels colder and more lonely than it should. But don’t let that guide you. Stay with the knowledge that you are a creature that loves, that sings, that has known immense joy guide you off into the dark night of the unknown.

Look up at the glowing moon through the clouds.

You’ve loved before — you went from feeling alone to feeling held — and you will again.

I wrote this song in the middle of writing a song a day for two weeks, and it’s on my 2024 album ‘Sunshine Special’.