As I write this I am sitting in a mother-f*cking airport for like the fiftieth time this year waiting to catch my thrice-delayed flight. I have before me a sadly tasteless vegan tuna melt that has literally melted into the brown paper bag holding it and a ratty tatty felt dog keychain looped into the zipper of my guitar case. I have held onto to this stupid little canine for as long as I remember, stuffing it into secret pockets every time it breaks off, making sure I don’t loose it at all costs, taping it to the inside of my shoe, sewing it onto the outside of my skin. And because of its insistence on showing up at every airport lounge it has come to remind me somehow of saying goodbye and of that time that we began to laugh and cry and cry and laugh about it all again…

And so I wonder now, what would it have been like for that wizard with the top hat... who spun love stories out of thin air and goodbyes... when the magic of the dreamed of and of the dreaded materialized into a real life so long, Marianne. And I wonder only because it makes my throat tremble with a funny kind of sadness, one that I suppose I secretly long for…just building it up for the breakdown, the final apocalypse-now-goodbye that is all too necessary for the living and the loving and the dying.

I imagine us all wriggling around in our placental packages mapping out our farewells to our own Mariannes right from the start, building it up for the breakdown, taking all the practice we can get. I try to calculate on all appendages the number of days that have gone between now and the time I said goodbye to my grandfather over our last MTR softee on MG road. I try to remember it in a grand kind of way, I bank on the devastatingly heartbreaking nature of it being the last, and I twist my now soggy brain inside out to understand why so many of us yearn for this kind of romance of the final. The quick fix immediacies mean little or nothing if they don’t figure in the larger picture, no, not that one…not the b.s. 2.2 children and pension plan picture...the one a little larger than that... the one in which there're a Marianne and a tattered keychain hanging around somewhere while we dance ourselves to the end of love. And so what does it take to make even a moment, an insignificant felt terrier with no story and no hind legs, what does it take to make all of this stuff stick around for the ride while we pack our bags and comb our hair and breathe in?

Perhaps nothing, perhaps they are inherently fixed to you and your picture whether you like it or not, no one really plans these things anyway. But also, maybe it takes some sort of final-farewell-intensity, just a pinch and a punch, so that we feel finally and fatally fixed, but subtly still, just in the background of everything else, you know, so we don’t have to live through the pension plan with a perpetual burning in the back of our throats. A moment exchanged to say, yes, yes, be there, please.

And I’m sure we all have different suitcases and different dance moves, and we’ll be taking with us different things and different moments, but I don’t doubt that we’ll each have our own Marianne, from all those years ago when we danced like gazelles over our golden childhoods, that one big rip through our hearts that is left gaping open because it’s filled with this funny kind of throat trembling sadness that kind of gets you going…something you remember every now and then when you look at love letters, pressed flowers and a shitty old key chain. We’ll all have that, surely, or some version of it. So when I look around this airport and attempt to eat whatever is remaining of this sandwich, I think of a wizard in a top hat who has perhaps gotten furthest in diagnosing the root cause of this throat tremble with his songs to Marianne and to the end of love, and I think of all the people around me, the thousands of them, incontinent and inconvenienced and of how they will inevitably build up their own Mariannes, in their heads perhaps, or in their homes, in old lovers, or in a passing glance at their own faces in a shop window. They’ll build up Mariannes who will hang around at the back of their throats, reminding them of old goodbyes and then urging them to map out…the big one, the final blast off… just so that when the time comes, they’ll remember, amidst a field of butterflies and fairy tales or whatever, what it was that once moved them to write a love song to a girl named Marianne.