squirmelia | Letter and Nostalgia

'And I kept thinking of some of the fields I had just seen, now barely turning to green, and how these fields reminded me of fears I had when I was younger - fears that nature might simply decide not to wake up one year. Nature would open her eyes, go back to sleep and never return.'- Douglas Coupland, Polaroids from the Dead.

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I remember when I first heard your music, I had no idea what it was or how to describe it, because it wasn't really like anything I'd heard before. The music stayed there, in my head, for months before I even found out what band it was.

I remember you being in Rome, and sometime not long before that, I remember that I didn't sing the Lorelei song to the rocks, to the siren, because on that school trip to Rhineland, Germany, I was listening to you sing instead, on my Sony walkman. That trip was the first time I had ever watched MTV, the only channel that seemed to be in English, and it blared from every room in the building where we stayed. I didn't go on any school trips after that one, not where I stayed away from home, anyway.

I remember standing by myself outside my grandparents' house in Hythe, on the steep hill where they used to live, wearing one of the t-shirts, and then a boy walking past, wearing the same t-shirt. My grandparents aren't around now either, and I wonder whether that boy still walks up that hill.