Quinn Christopherson // Bubblegum

Post by Misha

During the last few years, I have sometimes imagined myself as a passenger at sea (my apartment, having roughly the dimensions of a ship’s cabin, lends itself amiably to the metaphor). The shore is a memory and I am bobbing. Blue. Rudderless.

I have a feeling that despite the meticulous calendar records, a careful x scratched over each sunset, I will wash up somewhere suddenly and be surprised by how much I’ve changed and the ground has stayed the same, or maybe the other way around. That, either way, I will have fallen out of time with what I remember my life to be.

In ‘Bubblegum,’ time has a theoretical quality, of landscape passing through the windows of a moving train, a blur of the tantalizing but untouchable reality. It is a waltz across memory and dream, and gentle fingers through the hair of the two, unbraiding them from each other. Uncertainty remains, stubborn and sunny, even after all the pieces of chronology have been laid out like glossy museum exhibits, one after the other. The sum is mismatched with its parts. Documentation is swallowed by mystery.

The song’s lyrics are brief, lovely, and blurry; snapshots in a shoe box under a bed. (I am seventeen years old. I am alcohol. I am wine in the bathroom stall.) I can’t help but follow them where they lead, often into my own mind. I am thirty-one years old. I am coffee mugs and half unpacked boxes. I am chewed up pen caps. I am winter, aching for spring. I am lost at sea.