I’m talking a specific line or couple of lines that align perfectly with how you feel either about yourself or your experiences. Or even a single line that has a profound impact on you in a way that you perhaps don’t relate to, but instead feel really describes and sums up a moment of great despair or hopelessness.
Off the top of my head I have two. One is a lyric in a song by City and Colour. I can’t recall the song title exactly, but the line is “I’ve always been dark, with a light somewhere in the distance.” For me that line resonates because its an exact depiction of how I’ve felt since early childhood in the sense that I know I do have some level of capacity for hope and happiness, but most of the time it feels faint and distant, while the vast majority of time I’m just lost in feeling empty and hopeless and in perpetual darkness.
The other lyric is out of a song titled “Whitney” by Swedish artist Albin Lee Meldou. The lyric is “...you can try asking Whitney about that, alone in a bathtub with a pipe and the crack.” While its not exactly directly relative, every time I hear the song that lyric in particular pulls at my emotions the hardest, as I always imagine how the last moments would have been for Whitney and what she may have felt, and how I have been in fairly similar predicaments potentially feeling the exact same way. It’s hard to explain accurately what happened and how, but drawn to mind is a specific moment in time that just felt so low and hopeless that I’d one night raided the cupboard of a family member whom I’d been living with for as much alcohol as I could get without her noticing had gone, and then drank as much as I could as fast as I could with the sole purpose of getting so drunk that I couldn’t feel anything. As a result I ended up throwing up relentlessly on the floor of of a hot shower and, as dramatic and theatrical as it sounds, drifting in and out of consciousness before just passing out stone cold and coming to a couple hours later in cold shower. Though two very different substances and end results, I wonder if that had been exactly what it had been like for Whitney. It’s this reason exactly that lyric has such a profound effect on me, along with the fact that the lyric also ties in really well with the rest of the song’s subject matter, which perfectly reflects one of the things I had been going through in that time.