Afterthoughts
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things that stayed with me.
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feeling

emotional

2 books3 films4 albums
In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
album1998

In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

Neutral Milk Hotel

I resisted this album for years because of how much people talked about it. Then one night it made complete sense. The rawness isn't affectation — Mangum sounds like he has no choice but to mean every word. Two-Headed Boy Pt. 2 is the most heartbreaking song I know. I return to it when I want to feel something.

★★★★★5.0
emotionalnostalgicquietly-brilliant
stayed with me
A Moon Shaped Pool
album2016

A Moon Shaped Pool

Radiohead

Daydreaming is the best thing Radiohead have done since Kid A. The whole album feels like a reckoning — slower and more orchestral than anything before it. True Love Waits finally got its proper recorded version after twenty years of live performances. It was worth the wait and somehow sadder for it.

★★★★½4.5
emotionaldarkbeautiful
stayed with me
Normal People
novel2018

Normal People

Sally Rooney

Rooney writes interiority like no one else. You spend the whole book frustrated that they won't just talk to each other — and then you realise that's the point. The miscommunication isn't a plot device. It's the subject. I recognised too much of myself in both of them.

★★★★☆4.0
emotionalfeel-goodnostalgic
Past Lives
film2023

Past Lives

Celine Song

Song's debut and one of the best films about adult longing I've seen. Nobody is the villain. Nobody does anything wrong. It's about the roads not taken — and how they shadow the ones you did. The last ten minutes are devastating without a single dramatic thing happening.

★★★★★5.0
emotionalnostalgicbeautiful
stayed with me
Arrival
film2016

Arrival

Denis Villeneuve

The twist recontextualises everything, but unlike most films with twists, the rewatch is better than the first viewing. It becomes a film about accepting loss rather than escaping it. Amy Adams carries the whole thing with barely any dialogue. Villeneuve at his most precise.

★★★★★5.0
thought-provokingemotionalslow-burn
stayed with me
Moonlight
film2016

Moonlight

Barry Jenkins

Three chapters, three versions of a person. Jenkins uses light and silence like language — every frame is a deliberate choice. I've thought about the diner scene more than most things that actually happened to me. The ending is so quiet and so much.

★★★★★5.0
emotionalbeautifulquietly-brilliant
stayed with me
Carrie & Lowell
album2015

Carrie & Lowell

Sufjan Stevens

I put this on during a long drive and had to pull over. Not because it's a sad album — though it is — but because it's so specific. The grief is particular and named and that makes it more universal somehow. Death With Dignity and Should Have Known Better are in my permanent memory. Return it to regularly, always unexpectedly.

★★★★★5.0
emotionalbeautifulquietly-brilliant
stayed with me
Never Let Me Go
novel2005

Never Let Me Go

Kazuo Ishiguro

Read it in one sitting and spent a week quieter than usual. What it says about memory, complicity, and the smallness of our rebellions has no clean resolution — and that's the point. I kept waiting for them to fight back. They never do. Neither, the book implies, do most of us.

★★★★★5.0
emotionalslow-burnquietly-brilliant
stayed with me
Blonde
album2016

Blonde

Frank Ocean

There's no album that sounds more like the interior of someone's mind. Ocean builds moods rather than songs — Nikes, Self Control, Nights. The sequencing is part of the meaning. I've listened to it beginning to end more times than I can count and it still feels new in different moods.

★★★★★5.0
nostalgicbeautifulemotional
stayed with me