As it was
It’s my 31st birthday today and I can’t stop thinking about “As it was” by Harry Styles. When this song first came out, it felt like such a hopeful, direct response to the pandemic. A dance between devastation and the will to keep going. Almost two years later, on this 31st birthday, the song rings deeper in my bird bones.
I wish someone told me that the older I get, the more my heart aches. And the aches are always different. Sometimes, the ache is because my heart is so full. It’s so full and grateful and relieved that it just gets so heavy in my chest and the gratitude spills out of my eyes and on to my cheeks, salt settling into the smile lines around my mouth. And other times it aches out of fear, a cold spot in my chest. It aches of loss and loneliness . That sweet sting of nostalgia. I think that’s why people say they hate birthdays. Because their hearts hurt and they can’t name it, so they blame it on a day that is supposed to be theirs, because it doesn’t feel like they own anything.
You know it’s not the same as it was.
I remember my 8th birthday very vividly. I had asked my mom if we could leave up our Christmas tree till my birthday. I tell this story a lot to my friends, because it’s so pure and sweet. Our tree, decorated only in red bows and lights, stayed up till the end of January that year- so that we could put my birthday presents under it. I just remember it feeling like we were breaking the rules for me to have that silly little tree. It made me feel so special.
At 31, the Christmas tree has turned into various different things. Exploring a new city, buying new books, drinking sweet coffees, and spending some time with Harry Styles.
I listen to “As it was” now and my heart aches in a Pavlovian response. I used to think the opening “Harry, we want to say goodnight to you” was a harkening back to a time in youth, but now I hear it as a reminder of family, friends- of people that depend on you and miss you and just want to say goodnight to you as you struggle through rolling with everything as it changes around you.
As you change.
The synth motif enters and the drums, with a teasing cymbal, immediately jump into the song. And the drums don’t stop for the entirety of the song. Even when the lyrics and vocal line wax melancholic about loneliness and feeling left behind (“and I’m the one who will stay”), the drums never stop.
Life never stops. God, even when you beg it to, when you plead with it to slow for a moment, it keeps moving just out of your grasp.
There’s a glockenspiel used in this song, it’s used in a few other songs by Harry, but I have this theory that it’s only used in songs that reference a loss of youth, or freedom. You can hear it around the ‘:56 mark and later it emphasizes the “you know it’s not the same” before the bridge of the song.
A gritty, electric guitar stomps in occasionally, ratcheting the tension of the song up by punctuating the vocal line.
And just when you’re not sure the song will have some kind of release, the bells come in. These fucking bells were brilliant. Bells are one instrument that represents change. Church bells chime hourly, to mark the passage of time. Wedding bells, a death knoll, and even the chime of a telephone are all bells that mark our lives. They can change us fundamentally. We can harden, lose ourselves and other people, be elated, celebrate, cry, wish for more time, or pray that time flies by faster. All of those feelings are held in the sound of the tubular bells that ring out at the end of “As it was”. These bells sound like the morning of my 8th birthday. They sound like the day I got married. They remind me of the church I grew up in and how terrified I was of god. They bring me to my grandparent’s farm and gardens of my childhood. They are the Sunday afternoon bells I hear in my neighborhood in Chicago. They’re so bittersweet and yet so hopeful.
It’s wild to witness how the passage of time changes me. How even listening to a song changes as I change. How turning 31 feels foreign, alien, out of body, but also exciting, beautiful, special, and brilliant. I’ve found that the older I get, the more my heart has to work to hold all of these feelings at the same time. The more ventricles and caverns I make inside of myself to house them all.
I think turning 30 was the first time I stopped running with the drums of life as they dragged me along. I want my 31st year to be the year I start listening to the bells. To seek out those pockets of life that are markers of change and to find ways to celebrate them. I want to be grateful for those goddamn bells, rather than avoid them. I want to embrace them fully.
It may never be the same as it was, but I’m grateful I’m here to embrace all of it.
