Nightswimming

From Automatic for the People (1992).

I've always wanted to draw this verse:

The photograph on the dashboard

Taken years ago

Turned around backwards so the windshield shows

Every streetlight reveals the picture in reverse

Still it's so much clearer.

(click to enlarge)

This is probably on a lot of people's Most Beautiful Songs Ever list. I know it's on mine. We all have that memory. The one where you somehow entered a place where magic lived, fleeting, only for a few moments. The magic attached itself to that place in your brain where that memory now lives. And now it's not so much the actual event that you treasure, it's the memory of it. The memory is more magical and more important than that day, or that night, or that time ever was in reality.

For me, it was about water, too. The first time I saw the ocean, in Australia, in 2004. It was the middle of the day, and I was exploring the coastal beaches of Sydney with new friends I had made. I didn't have a bathing suit. I stood at the place where the ocean licked the beach. I rolled my jeans up so I could walk out a bit, get some of the salt water on my skin. I was watching the surfers in the distance. I was so transfixed by them that I didn't notice the massive wave heading in my direction. By the time I realized, it was too late -- I didn't have enough time to run back to the shore. I tried anyway, and the wave knocked me down into the water. I was drenched from head to toe, and I laughed with a joy that I had never felt before, so much, until my eyes watered their own ocean onto my cheeks.

Soaking wet, I proudly carried on exploring the city with my friends. In the Australian heat it didn't take long to dry off, but I never wanted to wash that ocean off my skin, out of my hair. It would be like washing off the happiest moment of my life.

I have a picture that was taken just as I was walking out into the water, moments before the wave took me down. I'll have to dig it out and relive that moment again soon.