I like to think that there’s a certain kind of growth every time we choose to reminisce a memory.
They tend to carry so much information about specific moments in our life. Whether we like it or not, they can carry tidbits of the simplest memories such as the feeling of flower petals falling down, and the way the sun kisses your skin at the right angle making you glow and shine brighter than the giver itself. This has been a constant lyric in For You, where it symbolizes that most times, these are the kinds of images that we choose to remember. The good ones. The happy ones. The ones where we know that there is at least a happy result waiting afterward for us.
All throughout the song, they have expressed feelings of uncertainty, loneliness, and anxiety at times before the awaited moment, which gives us the feeling that being distanced from the person we’ve created our special memories with isn’t a walk to the park. Despite all those, the verses are always ended with assurance and a spark of hope that whoever awaits us at the end of the line feels the same as we do now; feeling and thinking and doing their best to reach us just as much.
With Film Out, the person we’ve associated our memories with is no longer waiting at the metaphorical end of the line. The feeling of uncertainty, loneliness, and anxiety has been repeated yet again, and this time it becomes the theme of the song. This shift in the theme that was already originally mentioned but never fully discussed, is what gives the song a fuller and more meaningful sound. They talk about the longing and the pain it brings now. This differs so much from before, where there is always a constant, tangible memory that’s ready to give us the giddy and happy feeling we always do after we anticipate for some things to happen. Now, they cling to the memory, continuously reliving every moment along with every detail in it. This is what makes it so vivid and so believable to our senses that if we try to alter it to even the smallest detail, the memory wouldn’t feel the same anymore. It would just become a hollow shell of what used to be.
This is what happens at the end of Film Out, where they believed that the memory is happening all over again. They tried to ‘reach out’, which isn’t something they’ve done in the original memory but because of the constant longing and pain brought by the memory and its giver, they tried to do so. They then get slapped by the harsh reality that it’s not real and the memory is just that– a memory.
Despite the good and the bad that memories bring, I like to believe that it is what makes us human the most. It helps us to feel, and to be reminded and grounded to our past which could then help us to slowly move forward into a future that we may not envision now, but can definitely happen as long we choose how our life goes on.
