Your Ghost

For several months, a few plaintive notes have been haunting me, the briefest fragment of song curling up from my unconscious like a thin wisp of smoke. 

It was a cold night in October the first time it happened, at the curve of the walkway in the autumn wind. The melody was too brief and the lyrics were too fuzzy in memory to make out, yet enough to catch a distinctive, twanging ache. It was something I'd known very well once, but no amount of thinking would bring it back. 

It would come to me again and again at unguarded moments - under the garden archway or at the kitchen door at night. Shoot you down, were those the words I was hearing? Such an odd lyric, you'd think I'd remember. But maybe I had it wrong. There was no way to find out. 

I gave up trying to place it and instead let it draw me to where it seemed to want to go - the reflection that everything at last becomes a memory, even the most ordinary moments take on added meaning in retrospect. 

Last night, without warning, it came flooding back. The 3 seconds from 2:00 - 2:03 in Damien Rice's version  of Your Ghost. "Let him shoot me down" goes the lyric, and I saw how it had taken so long to retrieve. In the original, more familiar version, Kristen Hersch delivers the line with a slightly challenging air and doesn't linger. Lisa Hannigan's vocal, however, has no challenge in it, only mournful acceptance. It may be the saddest line in the whole song. 

It's not lost on me that my fuzzy recollection had changed the wording from the first to second person, becoming not so much a dare but a piece of melancholy advice. There are no accidents in matters of the psyche, nor in cosmic timing. I understand now why the line came to me the way it did, and why the source comes back to me now. 

It's our fate that we must co-exist with our ghosts.