Thinking of Time, enforced by Ethel Cain's Album Willoughby Tucker, I'll Always Love You

Almost two weeks of being single has found me slowly picking up sharp-edged fragments of my life while trying not to be cut by them. As you can imagine, this has been a depressing and almost impossible task. Having to juggle my Master's thesis, trying to find somewhere else to live, packing my life up, figure out finances, go to work, enduring what would have been the three year mark, all while grieving the great lost love of my twenties has allowed me to grapple with the concept of how time moves. She is slow, deceitful, she yearns, she loves, she loses. Having to consistently acknowledge her presence as she demands not to be ignored is both exhausting and strangely freeing. Knowing that almost two weeks have passed since everything fell apart in front of my eyes is sobering. Because, soon that two weeks will be a month, that month will become three, then six, then 12. Within that time, I have a holiday, a concert, my birthday, going away with my best friends, my mum's birthday and Christmas to look forward to. All of this is on the horizon and I know exists in the universe within which I live. Another example of how time in this day and age moves so quickly, which is both a blessing and a curse.

As I sit here writing this, I am listening to Ethel Cain's newest album: Willoughby Tucker, I'll Always Love You. The first song I heard from this album, Nettles, forced me to confront some very difficult feelings that had laid dormant for years. The opening to this song is the feeling of a hot summer's day, sat with my first proper boyfriend atop Cleeve hill in my home town. It's the smell of the sweet sunshine and an energise Innocent smoothie. It's a fire embedded deep in the woods, next to the small creek that he would later swim in. These were all of the thoughts that involuntarily came into my mind when the song opened. At this point in time upon first hearing the song, I was still under the guise of a happy relationship with a wonderful boyfriend, so about a month and a half ago. Despite loving where I was at in my life, this song unearthed feelings and emotions that I thought had long been left in the soil. The most poignant of all the feelings was guilt. In that relationship, I had to become someone he could save and protect. Someone that was driven by understanding his every move, every thought, every emotion. These were behaviours that became conditioned and part of what I believed a normal relationship looked like. That is not to say that I am entirely admonished of any responsibility, because I still had the autonomy to not act that way. Yet, I did. The worse these behaviours became, the more strained the relationship became. I was not normal, and neither was he. We existed within a bubble that drove me to become a girl that needed constant saving from a man that was four years her senior at the tender age of 18.

Fast forward to turning 20 at uni, this way of thinking, behaving, existing was still so deeply ingrained in my brain that it became a foundation point of my most recent relationship. I was still that girl that felt she needed to be someone who could be saved. With this, the behaviours of needing to know the whereabouts of her saviour, his thoughts, feelings, emotions, all came into play. These are behaviours that I painstakingly had to unlearn over the ensuing 3 years, and that was a step I had taken too little, too late. The damage had already been done, and this became most apparent when the person I loved raised it in his closing statement to me on the day it all ended. If he ever reads this, I want him to know how sorry I am that I could not have started that process sooner to be the person he wanted me to be.

All of this to say, sometimes it takes an awful situation to make you realise how far you have come as your own person. Behaviours and emotions that I would have once felt during a break-up were not so much as fleeting through my mind that night, nor in the weeks that have followed. This has made me realise how time has changed me for the better, at least for now. It has given me the understanding to know that this is a glimpse of who I will be as a person going forwards, and that has provided me with a sense of pride in an unruly and tumultuous time.

On the night everything ended, I had been listening to this album for the first time since its release a few days prior. Having not heard it before, it was soothing an anxious part of my brain that could not shake the feeling that something was horribly wrong in my relationship. I had only made it up to the song Dust Bowl before I heard the words "I can't do this anymore" tumble out of this tender man's mouth. So, today as I sit in a small coffee shop delaying the writing of my dissertation, I am finishing the album. One and a half songs remain before it will be over, and I can't help but wonder if i'll feel a sense of closure at the end of Waco, Texas. Will I be able to start shedding the skin of the person I was two weeks ago, or at the very least be able to consider the thought? I'll find out soon enough, but for the time being i'll enjoy the few minutes I have left as this version of myself.