The King is Dead

When I was snowed in at Heathrow for 9 hours, the new Decemberists album leaked. My friend sent it to me, and I listened to it several times while crying in the airport. I listened to it while crying on the tube back to my empty flat in Central London. I listened to it for days afterwards, wandering depressed around Camden Town and South Bank.

It's funny. I can no longer separate in my mind that music from that time in my life. On days now where I feel terribly alone and disconnected from the people at hand, who I claim to love the most, I begin to miss London and the way I haunted the city like an invisible ghost listening to The Decemberists. I miss the weight of missing people, the way I felt so far away from everyone because physically, I was so far away. Now when I feel alone, I feel this weight of missing the people who are right in front of me, the weight of feeling emotionally separated from the people I want to know me and understand me. But I still listen to the new Decemberists, pretending I'm in London, so far away from the people from whom I feel so far away.