The song that always gets me

New York feels desolate this time of year. The rails are slick, the trees bare. It has been unseasonably warm, and today the sky was loaded with mist—the type of air that catches your breath, a trace unfurling.

The darkening sky. The bald man with a newspaper. The silent ride home as desperate waves crash against the Manhattan Bridge below.

I felt the pull of a song that I couldn’t quite place. It wasn’t a lyric stuck in my head but a minor chord progression lingering underneath something insistent, thick. I get like this sometimes. Feelings. Today.

Is it Explosions in the Sky? (No). The tessellating diminishment. The beating heart. No.

I couldn’t get past the rhythm. Something pulling. Something desperate.

And then I remembered a lyric: “Is it a video?”

I tried looking through my liked songs on Spotify, but nothing stood out. Nothing reached me.

I ate dinner. James brought me a tea. I still couldn’t figure it out.

And then I find it. Sufjan Stevens’s Visions of Gideon.

Stevens wrote the song for the soundtrack for Call Me By Your Name. I can remember watching the film, but I don’t recall where this song is included. The credits maybe? It doesn’t matter because my memory of it is as a song that completely drowns me. It is a song I play when I want to be engulfed in want. When I cannot express something, when I am at a loss, and yet, cannot stop. Cannot let go. It is a song that makes me hold out for a resolution that only ever insinuates itself as a possibility, a desire.

I don’t like that this is my song. Not my song so much as one of my desperate songs. I don’t like that it gets me. But it does.

What song always gets you, in that desperate way, to sink into it, to recall desire itself? What song always gets you to that place?