The Postal Service have a great song, The District Sleeps Alone Tonight, about the lead singer missing his girlfriend as she moved to Washington DC (aka The District). It belongs to the genre of ‘melancholic pop’ that shall not be found on a mega-music shop placard, yet which seems to be prevalent across a number of markets.
I read it (or listen to it!) more in terms of someone realising their own deficiences, mainly because of the line: I realised I was the one worth leaving. Such celebratory sadness! Perhaps there is a collective sense of disappointment with the mechanism of social expectation as we loll with delicious ennui in the post-Enlightenment gutter. I don’t know. I do know what it is like to miss someone, and the delicate realisation the lyric expresses of feeling like a stranger in their new world. A similar feeling emerges sometimes when I feel myself doing something different when it shouldn’t be. A similar overexposure to unfamiliarity, but born from a self-displacement in the -micro-ritualised rhythms of everyday life.