Glitter In The Air

This is a love song. A true love song; one of the most real, most vivid, most honest love songs I think I've ever heard.

It starts with a wish and so much emotion. Like the title of the song: have you ever thrown a fistful of glitter in the air? I mean, what an image! It's giving up control, throwing yourself into the wind and not caring about what kind of mess it makes, and not even knowing what's going to happen, but trusting it–looking fear in the face and saying "I just don't care", that's exactly it. "Have you ever fed a lover with just your hand" is a beautiful, subtle metaphor for feeding a horse, holding out your hand and flattening it out and trusting that it won't bite you! She compares a lover to this animal waiting to be fed, and love to this wild uncontrollable thing that honestly can't be tamed, and she knows it.

Then so much anticipation and uncertainty, unpredictability, and raw feeling–the tip of the iceberg, the sun before the burn, the breath before the phrase, the thunder before the lightning–just those last two images placed right next to each other, man, talking compared to lightning? A simple breath with all the weight and power of thunder? Yeah, that's truth right there.

"Have you ever hated yourself for waiting by the phone? Your whole life waiting on the ring to prove you're not alone." I gasped out loud and nearly cried when I realized the double-entendre of "waiting on a ring." And how perfecly, how magically that ties up both the beginning and the peak of a relationship, waiting for a phone call, waiting for a proposal, and how important those two points are; how incredible life-changing and joyous, or how completely desolate and lonely. Either way.

"Have you ever been touched so gently you had to cry?" Because so many times, the touch has been harsh, time has killed small parts of her, this animal of love that she had trusted had bitten her, the trust was betrayed, the decision went the other way; all of that, all the pain and loneliness of simply being human, and then one person comes in and with a gentle touch, a moment of happiness, contrasted against all that thunder and lightning, against strangers, against time, against everything that is wrong about life; it's almost spiritual when it goes right.

And throughout, the sense of endless passage of time and the constant evolution, of being able to grasp this thing, this animal, only for a moment before it disappears completely: "it's only half past the point of oblivion," (time will eventually undo all), "the hourglass on the table, the walk before the run"–soon the time will be up, everything will speed up, the glitter will be on the floor, the mess will have to be dealt with, reality will set back in, but "have you ever felt this way?" Just for a moment?

Then the image of that moment. There they are, a lover, just in a day to day moment, sitting in the garden with her coffee, calling her Sugar. So simple, so clear, but this is a moment of pure, unadulterated happiness: a time in her life that's completely right. Yet, it's nested between this fear of the passage of time, the fear of a beginning and the fear of an end, in-between absolutely everything that has happened and could happen and will happen, and somehow, in the midst of it all, she still manages to be so happy.

And she wants to keep that, so badly–she wants it to pause, she wants to be in this moment forever, she wants to lasso the moon, do the impossible, hold your breath so maybe–just maybe–time stops. And have you ever asked yourself, "Will it ever get better than tonight?" Time will keep marching on, and the uncertainty in that question–it's not rhetorical I don't think–is astounding. Will there ever be a moment better than this one, ever? If not, then what does that mean for the rest of her life? What if things go sour? What if time keeps slipping? What if these moments fade away and we can't keep them?

It's bittersweet. The best moments of our lives will pass. "Have you ever" is repeated so many times in this song, and for good reason–this is a memory. This is in the past. She's looking back on it with reverence, as a sequence of events that led up to the best one she can remember, one that she looks at in awe and amazement, one that she recognizes is so beautiful that she may never have another experience exactly like it ever again. And there's something deeply sad about that, about that entire condition, which is, I think, why this is not strictly a happy song.

But it is real. So real. This is why I said this is the truest love song I have ever heard. Love is not happy, love is not sweet, nor is love sour or bitter or unkind. It is all of those things at once, and sometimes none at all. One moment may be an absolute divine revelation, the next might be having coffee in the garden, the next might be goodbye, or a phone call or maybe a proposal, and after that could be anything. But all of that is part of love and part of life. And here we are sitting in the middle of it, taking just one moment at a time, and how crazy and amazing it is that you're sitting here calling me sugar drinking coffee in the midst of a hurricane of emotions; that you are the eye of the storm, an incredible calm when everything before is painful, everything after is uncertain, and everything around is spinning wildly. Will it ever get better than tonight? I think the last note this song leaves is positive, uplifting, if only that she leaves that question open, waiting to be answered: maybe with you here, it will get better. We can have more of this. It is possible, and as hard as it is to believe, she just has to trust it.

This song is masterful. How much truth, how much emotional reality and intelligence there is packed into this I can't even begin to describe. And the way she sings it! Throws her heart and soul out there for everyone to see, like glitter in the air.