Jar of Hearts

Today I was listening to a song by Christina Perri called “Jar of Hearts.”  Every now and then I stumble across a song that knocks me for a loop – it snatches up a feeling or a memory from somewhere inside that I’ve forgotten about (or have been pretending to) and I feel like a doll coming apart at the seams.  Do you have a song like that – one that takes one of the most emotionally intense times of your life and compresses all that feeling into 4 minutes of sound?  “Jar of Hearts” is one of those songs for me, and I started thinking about how invaluable that kind of song can be.   I like to think I’m pretty good at expressing myself, but no matter what I’m thinking or feeling, it seems that someone else has also thought it or felt it and managed to express it in the way I would if I knew how…and it’s the most wonderful feeling of catharsis.  I wasn’t able to say it, but someone else was, and that’s just as good.
There was a boy.  I loved him like I’ve never loved anything or anyone else.  It ended very, very badly.  When the dust finally settled, I was convinced I’d never be all right again.  I was always going to hurt, was always going to be sad, would never find a way to be at peace with it.  He did things that nobody has the right to do to another person, and in the months I spent sifting through the fallout, he had the temerity to try to remain part of my life, and over and over again I found myself wanting to hunt him down, grab him by the collar and scream “Who the hell do you think you are?” I’ve since learned that I won’t always hurt, I won’t always be sad, I will find a way to be at peace with it, and most importantly, it doesn’t matter who the hell he thinks he is.  But “Jar of Hearts” is about that “who do you think you are?” feeling, and it brings me back to it in an instant….and it’s funny, because it’s not a bad thing.  I’ve been listening to it over and over again.  It seems counterproductive to listen to a song that makes you feel sad, but we all do it.  I think we’ve all put on “Everybody Hurts” or something similar when we’re feeling particularly sorry for ourselves, and strangely, we feel better afterward.  Why is that?  Because it’s reassurance that someone else has felt the same way, and not only that, they’ve also turned it into something beautiful.  That last bit is the important part for me.  There a lot of really lovely songs (and poems, and books, and art) about really ugly things.  I think that turning something ugly into something beautiful is just about the strongest thing a person can do—downright heroic, in fact—and it makes me feel better about the world to know that there are people out there doing it.  So in a circuitous sort of way, the songs that make me feel like a doll coming apart at the seams actually manage, when all’s said and done, to sew me back together again.