Return to Cozy Island

All the happy faces and memories are killing me
Am I already dreaming
Please tell me that I only sleep

See you Soon – Lord of The Lost

There are so many songs I carry within me, often resurfacing from the sea of memories. Many of them are tied to my childhood and adolescence, to those times when I would lock myself in my room to learn lyrics by heart, only to belt them out at the top of my lungs in the shower.

But the one I want to talk about today, in response to this prompt, is a song I discovered just a few years ago: See You Soon by Lord of the Lost.

It is a track I associate with a deeply significant loss: that of my mother. The opening bells instantly take me back outside the church where we held her funeral. The lyrics, heartbreaking and raw, wrench something deep inside me. I know these harsh, jarring feelings might seem out of place for a cozy space like this, but before I learned to put my emotions into words, all I could feel was physical pain. Over time, I came to realize that this was simply my body’s way of expressing what it had always been taught to hide and suppress.

Whenever a disaster struck, my father would often tell me, “Veronica, crying is useless, it doesn’t solve problems.” That phrase soaked deep into my bones, shaping what I believed to be the “correct” way to deal with life’s events.

Everything changed with the loss of my mother. I finally learned that nothing should be bottled up (otherwise, sooner or later, you implode). But I’ll return to this topic, and to how much psychotherapy helped me, another day.

The lyrics I quoted at the beginning make me imagine that, in her final moments, my mother might have sought refuge in happy memories, or experienced a sense of suspension, as if she were merely drifting off to sleep, safe from the pain. It’s a thought that makes my knees tremble, but I also believe it is a profound act of love: a quiet attempt not to leave her alone, even in those final seconds.

The lyrics by Lord of the Lost capture that exact limbo, that blurred threshold between dreams, memories, and surrender. Music so often does this: it lends us the words to gaze into abysses we wouldn’t even know how to name on our own.