i'm wide awake, it's morning

Bad Head Day.

I'm not going to go on about it. They happen, they suck, they pass.

The relevant thing is that, desiring to channel the tired, boring grief to something more impassioned, I popped in I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning on the drive to work and skipped to “Poison Oak.” I’ve listened to that song hundreds of times, and as I tiredly absorbed the beauty of the Pennsylvania landscape I can’t quite appreciate I focused on a space of bare acoustic strumming toward the end of the song, anticipating the upcoming line delivered into the emptiness that precedes a particularly intense lyrical-musical climax: “You’re the yellow bird that I’ve been waiting for.”

I thought in impulse fragments about the yellow bird symbol that crops up a couple of times in that album, and its multilayered and not entirely differentiable meanings, and in the instant when the music cut to silence before Conor sang that line, a goldfinch flashed across the road in front of me, the morning sun behind me glancing off its breast.

And I felt better and worse all at the same time, and I didn’t know what it meant, but I knew it meant something, and something important, because nothing is an accident, and I felt the suddenness of an undifferentiable presence, and I started to cry.