I must let go of this endless summer afternoon.

This declaration usually comes into my life like clockwork at the tail end of July’s wet and sticky tongue — and all for different reasons. Once, it was the end of high school and the beginning of college; then, it was growing into the outlines of my adulthood; now, it is treading the tumultuous waters of heartbreak. 

“Melodrama,” Lorde’s sophomore album, came out more than seven years ago. To this day, the album continues to be a sonic prism illuminating my deepest truths and contractions.

Take the album’s opener, “Green Light.” The song’s central refrain — “I wish I could get my things and just let go / I’m waiting for it, that green light, I want it” — is a simple yet powerful plea to the nervous system to move on, already, from the mourning. It’s a euphoric pop banger with layered synths and a spritely keyboard backing, but the upbeat tempo betrays the song’s message. This contradiction is why the song remains exquisite. 

The green light, however, is also replaceable with the desire for forward motion and freedom. My “green light” is a chameleon for my needs in moments of placation, and I have hijacked the song to serve liberating or melancholic intentions when need be.

Likewise, the album thrives on subverting easily definable narratives. Its core trio of party songs — “Sober,” “Homemade Dynamite” and “Perfect Places” — encapsulates the dreamy kitschiness of being young and naive and rebellious in the uncertainty of the 21st century. 

For instance, “I hate the headlines and the weather / I’m 19 and I’m on fire” in “Perfect Places” is almost immediately bookended by “Let’s blow our brains out to the radio” and “All of our heroes fading / Now I can’t stand to be alone.” Parties mask the sadness of being alive, the desire to be known and seen in the world among a chorus of nameless bodies thirsting for the same vindication from normal life.

“Homemade Dynamite” packs another gut punch, but stop listening for a few seconds and you’ll miss it: “We’ll end up painted on the road, red and chrome / all the broken glass sparkling / I guess we’re partying.” Death from underage drinking and driving becomes a glitzy painting. 

These songs found me in the early stages of college as I was still drawing in my outermost features. It was nice to be surrounded by other newly minted adults post-COVID-19, ignoring my impending aimlessness about who I wanted to be and how I would go about those means. It was all fun and games, of course, until someone spilled their guts beneath the outdoor lights — or viewed the wreckage from the safety of morning sobriety, as effortlessly penned in “Sober” and “Sober II (Melodrama).”

Amidst this noise comes “Liability,” perhaps the best expression of the crushing weight of true authenticity. I still lose my breath when I hear “I am a toy that people enjoy / ’til all of the tricks don’t work anymore / and then they are bored of me.” It is exhausting to toe the line between expression and performance, to watch people pull back from your life at the expense of who you are. I have left this sadness in the past, but each time I hear the song, I remember how hard it was for me to decide who I was comfortable being.

I have since decided that “writer” is an acceptable definition for me, but even that comes with its own problems. Lorde says it best in “Writer in the Dark”: “Bet you rue the day you kissed a writer in the dark / now she’s gonna play and sing and lock you in her heart.” I sometimes wish I lacked the capacity to write about others out of fear that it makes intimacy with me inherently terrifying, for I cannot help myself from keeping score. Similarly, I’m often embarrassed by my tendency for sentimentality, but it’s an unchangeable feature in how I view the world. So be it. 

“Melodrama,” however, is still a joyous album if you allow it to be. “Supercut” relishes in the “what-if” stages of the end of a relationship, but it is a freeing anthem to dance to at night in your bedroom. Moreover, the one expressly happy song on the record, “The Louvre,” was the soundtrack to my summer. My love for the world and others was so great that, yes, it would be in the Louvre for all to see.

Life always has tricks up its sleeve, and the precious moments do not last as long as we want. It is a bittersweet feeling when music speaks back your feelings to you in clear, taut, economical language, especially in times of intense heartbreak. Someone has charted a celestial constellation for you to follow on the darkest nights, but it does not negate the pain that got you to the same place. 

Really, an album is only as great as its emotional resonance with the listener. “Melodrama” moved me enough at 16 to start writing poetry, and it still moves me to hear new sounds and see new colors despite the relentless winds of change.

In this stage of my little life, I’m stuck on “Hard Feelings / Loveless,” the turning point of the album and the definitive audio cure to a breakup. Every line is perfect, but I have found unmatched beauty in how Lorde ends the song after a drum-filled interlude that sounds like an inner world exploding: “I’ll start letting go of little things / ’til I’m so far away from you.”

I could lie and say I don’t feel a sharp pang in my chest when I see D.I.Y. bracelets and evil eyes and public pools and the orange and blue polo work shirt in my closet, but I will fake numbness until it becomes my reality. I still have strange nightmares where I’m running after one of the formerly best parts of my life on a one-way street, but these terrors will soon leave me too.

I’m writing poems. I’m painting my walls. I’m trying on new clothes. I’m going to bad house parties, buying long-sought-after records for my collection, sending secret messages and prayers into the universe, watering the garden, taking brave risks and forcing myself into the work of change. 

Time remains as mysterious as ever, a precocious and purposely coy animal with a nasty bite. I had love, a great love, and now I must let it fly free. For now, you’ll find me cutting flowers and lighting candles in all my rooms, tending for the day I care for myself the way I used to care about you.