I like to think about Somewhere Else as much as the next tma listener, but more often I find myself mulling on its absence.
There’s something so morbidly beautiful about complete and total death. Two desperate lovers begging for something better and getting precisely nothing.
All they went through, everything they did being totally pointless. Two beautiful beings of hope and light fighting with all they have against all the odds only to be completely destroyed, gone.
Everything they did meant nothing, and yet still it meant so much. Years of life and love recorded on tapes with nobody left to listen to them. A fleeting existence marked solely by its bleak, sudden ending.
People talk about those they love being taken too soon, “before their time”, but Jon and Martin always had their clocks marked. Whether by otherworldly powers of fear, those that surrounded them, or even the trappings of the narrative, they were always supposed to die then and there. In each others arms, and no amount of effort or exertion could have changed a single thing.
But despite this awful suffocating end that they were always bound to they loved each other. They shared moments that belonged to them and they laughed and they talked about cows and stumbled through misunderstandings and they got to show each other just how much they were worth.
Sometimes, I think, the inevitability of the ending makes those moments all the more beautiful.