Faithless
Sunday 8 PM

Something special, spiritual, ties me to "Sunday 8 PM" by Faithless. It's a sensation of cold, bewilderment, nostalgia, a perpetual sense of absence... A bit like what you feel after being abandoned by what you believed to be eternal Love, the helplessness that grips you from that weight that suddenly rests entirely on one’s shoulders (when it was once shared).

Long night walks in solitude, remorse and regret as your companions, a faithful echo of footsteps on grass freshly wet with dew, and, sporadically, the anger, which occasionally ignites you with flashes of pride. "The Garden", the track at the beginning of the album, has always meant this to me, a sweet autumnal cradle before the wintery "Bring My Family Back".

The bitterest memories are true beasts, domino pieces lined up waiting for just one to fall, causing all to collapse, pulling behind a caravan of memories that might have nothing to do with it, but know exactly when it's the right moment to come out, just to lash you a bit more (the sweetness of self-pity).

"Bring My Family Back" drags me into a vortex of faded images, and even today, almost ten years since I first listened to this album, the feelings remain the same: wounds that continue to burn, warm tears that seem to resurface like fumes carried by a dreary November wind.

The pain of being left behind, as I was saying, the loneliness. "My Lover's Gone" sings Dido, while you slowly leaf through letters and postcards ("Postcards") that marked important moments of your life together. Now only emptiness, only photos and postcards, which, regardless of what people say, no matter how beautiful, will always be too bitter for you to fully digest.

And when the hour has grown late, when that garden you've been walking in has become a tide that cyclically sweeps over and submerges you, when it seems you've been surviving your own melancholy for years, you decide it's time to return home, to reclaim your life, to piece together your puzzle ("Take The Long Way Home").

It's beautiful how your decision, your resilience, crumbles to nothing as soon as her smile reappears in your mind. Why do you leave? "Why Go?" "Why go, when you can stay for a while?" Those eyes, that mouth, that body call to you, mock your much-touted (but fictitious) renewed strength of spirit, reducing you once again to a paper boat at the mercy of stormy waves.

And suddenly the revelation. Your own pain, your melancholy, the suffering and unhappiness caused by being abandoned, will be what heals you—they will cure your wounds, from them you will rise again, not by fighting them but by making them yours, using them to survive ("This is my church, this is where I heal my hurts").

Now you can see the garden with new eyes, those of sweet melancholy. Everything around is peaceful, calm, the sky is clear, not a breath of wind, the cars are distant, not distracting. Everyone seems to be sleeping in a metaphysical atmosphere, like a city already deserted at eight on a Sunday evening ("Sunday 8 PM"). This is nirvana, this newfound serenity that makes you imagine a scene which, in another situation, would have killed you, but now stands as a manifesto of your rediscovered self: her and her new him, embraced, her caressing his hair, indifferent to the past just lived with you ("Killer's Lullaby").

By now the past is behind you, or rather it's a part of you, it has made you grow, it has helped you understand that, it's true, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

Music is strange, I would never have imagined that an album of a genre far from what I usually listen to, "Sunday 8 PM" by Faithless, could have escorted me so faithfully through an entire year of my life, a dark and troubled period indeed, but which, all things considered, might have been worse if it weren't (also) for this album.