Strobe Light

"If we could put into words every second someone lives on, we feel ourselves live on."

I grew up listening to this song, maybe hearing it for the first time not too long after it released. I was very young and impressionable and full of thoughts and doubts about the world and the people around me, I wasn't really sure of anything. Around that time I would've been in late middle school or early high school, having few friends, little people to talk to, and only online communities and media, as well as books, to really interest me.

I think I didn't fully understand this song, when ... I was young, it didn't make a lot of sense to me. I remember reading comments stating that it was about suicide or tragedy along those lines, and maybe in a way it was, I'm still not sure. I only really remember this then indescribable emotion the song gave me. The relatively monotonous singing of Miku's in the video, the simple, inoffensive sound of it. It comforted me greatly. The lyrics were confusing, and I know back then I loved confusing things, I was a silly little kid who wanted to know more about the world, so things I didn't understand pleased me greatly. I must've listened to this song, mesmerized by its simple and cute video, countless times.

Today, probably about 8 years later, I decided to rewatch this video, give it my full attention, and sing along with Miku, of course.
Today, I can tell you exactly why this song meant so much to me then, and why it means even more to me now.

"I'm looking for meaning in life."

The lyrics aren't as hard to understand as I remembered at all, maybe I was just stupid. No, I was childish, I couldn't understand this song because I think to understand this song I needed to be older. This song is about, or at least, what I feel it is about, is finding a reason to live. In a subconscious way, I probably understood this to a degree as a child, and as someone who, at the time, didn't really have a reason to live, I marveled at it.

The part of this song that I couldn't really understand was the latter half. After Miku's train ride, she is now older, most likely by several years if my interpretation of the MV is correct, she opens the old door, to her past self's room, though the little cats don't seem to want her to. As the lyrics state: "Now, what you were seeing is your own self facing yourself on that day." She's revisiting her past, her past thoughts, her past self.

"I walk because I was born."

Miku doesn't seem to think that she has changed much at all, though she remarks that so much has happened. At the end of the sequence, the past Miku is once again presented with two doors, the door to the future, and the door to the past. The final lyrics to the song, "If I can put into words every second I've lived, I should be able to start walking again.... Like you did one day," I have trouble, still, interpreting. I take it to be something personal to the creator of the song, Powapowa-p, who is no longer with us, having died in 2015, in, from what I understand, an unknown way. I understand, at the minimum, the core of what these lyrics represent, however.

This song is about hope, and about finding meaning, and today I know that that was what the indescribable emotion I got from this song in the past was. Miku has perhaps not truly found meaning by the end of this song, but nonetheless throws herself into the future, quite literally, and hopes that she should be able to start "walking" again, to move forward, so to say.

I know this review is a little silly, so many thoughts about such a short piece of media, but it has touched me more than most media I've consumed throughout my life. The lost feeling that so many of us share, as a child I didn't know if it was normal or not, beautiful art like this helped me understand this melancholy, and today I hold great nostalgia for it. I still only really walk because I was born, and I think that's okay. The world is something worth walking on. Every moment I spend feeling this great, silly sense of being lost, is interrupted with things like this that show me the beauty of the world. It's not necessary to understand where you're going, nobody is truly going anywhere, all that matters is that you go. Go anywhere, see the world, look at art.

Thank you for reading my review, it means a lot to me that others are seeing these words, and I hope you got something out of it. I'm glad to be alive, sharing my silly thoughts and feelings with the world.