some song by The Chicks that I don’t remember the name of

What I do remember is hearing it for the first time when I was 4 or 5 years old. I’d been put on the kitchen counter, and my mom was playing her Chicks cd while making food or doing dishes. The song was obviously sad, but I couldn’t understand why, so I asked about the lyrics and what the song was about. She explained that sometimes people leave your life or this life entirely and never come back, and that threw me into my first bout of existential dread. The worst part is that I can’t for the life of me remember which song it was (could be their cover of “Landslide” but that seems too obvious), and now the feeling is associated with the Chicks’ sound in general, so their music does me in every time. The memory I have about the whole thing feels adjacent to déjà vu, like it’s almost a sense memory but you can’t quite place it in time, so you construct a narrative around it that may or may not be true. Take my own little mythology(?) described above, for example. It’s true to the feeling, but is it true to what actually happened? Probably no. I think Woolf describes something similar in “Sketch of the Past” which I am now compelled to re-read the minute I put my phone down.

I’ve asked my mother about the song that made me cry when I was small and perched on the countertop that one time, and she naturally has no recollection of the specific moment but does remember owning several Chicks CDs and playing them often. So the jury’s out on that one I’m afraid.

I don’t know think that remotely answers your question, but answers are the most boring part of asking a question anyhow.