Painfuel. Kill me , kill me , kill me , you gorgeous woman. This was the first song I ever found by Mitski and it reminds me violently of my time in college. I was so deep in my OCD that I could not stretch myself to be in anything else, so I became outside of everything else all together. The overwashed skin on my hands gave blood through dry cracks and I was too frightened to even touch my curtains because I felt they were too close to the outside world to be safe to touch. When I hear this song, I think of that time and I give blood through a crack on my heart and I don't cry but I always want to.
This song struck me profoundly when I first met it, and it still does now. I can hardly listen to it because it scrapes at the walls of my chest in a way which is both comforting but deeply, deeply sad. I lost someone significant in my life a few years ago, now, and when she passed I listened to A Crow Looked At Me a lot. I always found this song to be the best from that album. Grief is abstract and none-euclidean and it moves indescribably like the colours you see when you press your fingers into your eyes. But this song anchors all of it into a single scene of a man losing the grief in something as simple as taking out the bin, obviously to have it settle back into him when he goes back inside. I think it is truly very beautiful.