It's that time again. I can now reasonably estimate the seriousness of this, and that is why I know: this could easily take months. On the street, early mornings, long evenings, in the car, behind the laptop: I let myself be swallowed up by our Eurovision Song Contest entry Europapa by Joost Klein. It's an obsession, in the purest sense of the word. The song gives me an extremely fulfilling, yes, a blissful feeling. Like a warm bath to stretch out in, and just as you start to break out in a sweat, the tap turns on for a trickle of cool sadness.
I've always had them, those times when I clung to a song. I remember a warm summer in 2007, I lived on the canal in a back house on the fifth floor. Mosquitoes had settled in buzzing colonies in the filthy gutters and our bedrooms, we were covered in humps, stinking pans and plates piled up in the kitchen, the floor was caked with dirt, we nestled on the sticky windowsills in the hallway, watching the into fathomless depths and smoked. I had the movie Anyway the Wind Blows by Tom Barman and buried myself in the soundtrack. Especially the song Summer's Here, so sweet and relaxed, it made up for everything. When I played it I was a rich Antwerp resident with an earring in a loft. I let it blare across the courtyard day and night and forgot the mosquito itch and the despair. Until my housemates collectively approached me, panic in their eyes, asking if I could please, please stop, because the mosquitoes were so far, but this mania, they lived in a hot hell, I would become a painful anecdote if I continued like this , 'how that one student lost her mind', didn't I realize that?
It's a childish thing, this buried in repetition. Like Cheese now in the Disney movie Encanto watches over and over again, silent, concentrated, completely closed off. He silently explores something capricious, unnameable within himself through the same thing over and over again, I think. That's how I do it with songs. I don't look for it, it happens to me, but always in the periods when I don't feel the apple and the tree, the categorical imperative, very firmly anchored in me. I need a grip on those empty days or weeks and music puts the chess pieces back in the right place.
I don't know what exactly has been wrong with me lately, maybe it was the nerves for my book presentation or the last winter throes, but I have Europapa just as desperately needed. It reassures me so much, that song. Not so much because of gabber nostalgia, because my mother wouldn't let me have a Nike Air Max, let alone a bomber jacket. But the sweet, sweet lyrics, that magical faun of a Joost and the ability to jump up and down with tears in your eyes when you listen to it: it's on.
If I Europapa listen, I am both very young and very old, I can suddenly see through all kinds of opaque layers, for a moment and I am forgiving of myself, humanity, the limitations of my life.
So I Europapa during the day, with the greatest advantage that I am not a worrying case for my children who jump along, but simply a very pleasant mother.
writes a column every week. She is the author of books, essays and plays.
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