As a young child I used to fall asleep to ABBA’s Arrival album. All songs had a distinct emotional connection and abstract meaning to me as I weaved in and out of sleep with their melancholy pop beats carrying me off to a vivid dream world.
But there was something more, something that has lodged itself in the corners of my memory despite the leap in years from its originating moment. The thing was that I was scared of the cover image of Arrival. Scared might not be the right word. Unsettled, disturbed, frightened…
I’m trying to remember when it was that I saw and understood that they were sitting in a helicopter. The five-year-old me did not. The little girl thought this was some kind of medical setting. Yes, you read that correctly. I had built an image that ABBA’s Arrival cover photo was somehow in a strange sterile hospital setting. In this bizarre cupola in the middle of what looked like a field. An unfamiliar sadness sat heavy on this photo, thought the little girl. Even the light was a sad orange. ABBA looked worried and hesitant. Something serious was taking place. It made the little girl nervous whenever she looked at the image. She was worried she would one day have to be in an awful and strange and captivating place like that. It was a mystery of something beyond the comprehension of a five-year-old.
And then, with a swoosh I land in 2025 and yesterday I saw it again. The cupola. The mysterious enclosure, and I began to see the connection. A slow lightning shot through the neurons. It wasn’t ABBA’s Arrival cover. This time it was something that I had created myself. It was the cover to my new book, Aubade! The woman in space, sealed inside her spacesuit inside a spaceship. Even the titles were similar! Arrival and Aubade. How strange are the connected strands across time and space that we don’t notice. But there they are, and who knows how many more exist?
Perhaps none of this makes sense to you. Perhaps one other person recognizes something similar from their own life. Some distant and vague memory from the early childhood that still to this day has a little invisible chord tied to it.
Life. It’s pretty awesome.
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