I can see how time has passed, I haven't been myself
On consciousness of change and Bellows’ “Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter”
There isn’t very much sunlight in the new apartment. The windows in our new place face east, with maybe four feet of alleyway separating our windowpanes from our next-door neighbors’. All of the natural light in our little place is gone by ten AM or so. Once the sun peaks in the sky, the apartment grows dark. One morning a few weeks ago, I got out of bed at three in the morning, as soon as I had accepted the fact that I wouldn’t fall asleep at all that night. I rubbed my eyes and put on a pot of coffee and sat on the couch and I watched the sunlight as the hours past, as the sun rose, shone briefly in through the windows and sheer curtains, and finally vanished.
Bellows’ 2016 album Fist & Palm is my favorite album. I think I’ve listened to it more than any other. The first song that got me was “Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter,” a lush pop track as square as the bedroom where it was recorded. My favorite enormous tiny song. All of the drums are mixed low in the instrumental, which makes every big moment sound soft. It feels massive without sounding threatening. There is a homemade-sounding trap cymbal that stutters beneath the lazy plucking of guitar strings in the chorus, while the baritone Kalb sings “Through spring, summer, autumn into winter, / I’m not comfortable at home, / or relaxed around my friends.”
One facet of my anxiety that I often wrestle with is the impulse thought that every year of my life has been worse than the last. Surely, I think, my life used to be better. Surely, at some point, I used to be happy. I see the new lines on my face every few months, the new notches on my belt, the declining balance of my bank account, and I remember some imagined past where I wasn’t worried about the way I looked, my direction in life, how many good friends I had left, or how much money I wasn’t making. Sometimes, in the early mornings especially, I think about the person I used to be, all of the jobs I’ve had, every college I attended, every party I’ve been to, everywhere I have lived. I think about past miseries and consider my victories. The other day, at the start of August, I put my favorite pair of jeans on and thought about how much time has passed since COVID-imposed quarantine began, how it was at one point cold enough to go out for groceries in jeans, a sweatshirt, and a mask made from an old dinner napkin.
That’s the part of me that “Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter” activates. It is a song about the consciousness of change, about growing into a new self with each passing season. There’s a slight unease, a small pang of anxiety in Oliver Kalb’s voice when he sings, “Through spring, summer, autumn into winter, / I can see how time has passed, / I haven’t been myself.” In the video for the song, which Kalb filmed over the course of a year, he invites you to watch him change along with him. He stands in the same part of the same park at different times throughout the year, the camera cutting to a shot of each new season with each word that leaves Kalb’s lips: spring, summer, autumn, winter. The weather changes along with Kalb’s clothes, the length of his hair, the number of leaves on each tree in the background and their colors.
When quarantine started, I needed a haircut. My girlfriend cut it for me at the end of March, buzzing off everything but the thick, overgrown flap of hair on top of my head, a DIY undercut. In the four or five months that have passed, my hair has grown back out, almost back to the length it was when all of this began. I’ve grown a beard, which I do every year or so when I need to see a different version of myself in the mirror each morning. I’ve gained twenty pounds or so, and my body looks different, my chest broader and more pronounced, my waist thicker at my belt line.
“Spring Summer Autumn Winter” offers no reassurance. There’s no point at the end of the song where Kalb returns to a former self, or accepts that former selves are simply lost to annals of time. The chorus only offers a brief admission of discomfort and an acknowledgement of change.
Still, I’ve been wearing jeans lately. I’ve been taking long walks on the boardwalk, around the lake in Spring Lake, through the woods at 80 Acres Park. When the motivation strikes, I go for a run around town, listening to old favorite albums like Fist & Palm in my headphones to distract me from the burn in my calves. I’ve been trying to make coffee the way I used to, before I resigned myself to the ease and price of the grocery store variety. I haven’t shaved my beard yet, but I’m sure I will soon. I haven’t cut my hair again yet, and I probably won’t.
Most importantly, I’ve been waking up earlier. I try to catch the sunlight. Sometimes I oversleep, exhausted by the daily grief of the current moment. Sometimes, I catch a ray of light through the window, and I watch it as it rises, extends across the floor, and eventually disappears.