I’ve been listening to “Oh,” a song from Dave Matthews’ Some Devil, quite frequently, at least a few times a day, since the album was released a week ago. Like many of the songs on the album, I’m not terribly familiar with the lyrics just yet, but the tone of the song combined with the scattered lines that I do know have led me to become comfortable with it. “Oh,” in particular, though, I’ve become attached to. It’s a love song, in which the singer attests to his great and simple love for a girl. For no reason that’s clear to me, I’d come to think of this girl as a young child, perhaps a toddler, and while I became attached to the song, I fleshed out my image of this girl and what she must be like and, by extension, became attached to her.
It was not until this afternoon that I listened more closely to the lyrics and she died, right there and then. Or, rather, she had died, long previously, only nobody told me. Worse still, I had (monstrously) overlooked her death—despite her chair, dusty with disuse—and I feel terrible about it.