Landslide – To a Lonely Heart

The journey of life resembles a trip to an unknown land. You don’t know what you’ll see, what you are gonna experience, and what is about to happen. Somewhere in the halfway or so, you don’t even have a clue about what to expect. That’s the moment of a soul of solitude, the giant shadow hidden in the dark corner of stairs, the lingering sadness after an unexpected jubilation, and the epiphany at the dead end of a path in the forest.

I don’t know any other songs of Fleetwood Mac, but I’m often enchanted by the lyrics and melody of this Landslide. There on a muddy path besides the paddy field, I, as a kid, used to seek something. I cannot describe clearly what it is, but it was supposed to be something important, interesting, or intriguing to some extent. The middle-aged indulge themselves in the sweetness of childhood a lot. But when you’re a child, one of the craziest dreams you ever had was to become an adult, like you can solve all the troubles and handle all the miseries of life then.

You’ve read load of romantic stories, many tales of romance written by those phonies who’re defined as love masters by the public. Gray-haired, you’ll never find the so-called ideal relationship you’ve been dreaming of. Landslide is some kind of natural disaster, but it’s like a mild cold when compared to the moment when you woke up from the sweet dreams of breathtaking views on the mountain top. Everyone is some kind of slave of life. We dread approaching the end of the year, terrified by the fact that youth becomes a term that has nothing to do with us. Worse still, we know clearly that things will never happen according to the predefined script in the fairytales we read as children. The prince will end up the life with some gold diggers, and the princess, a vulgar and unmannered beast. But that’s OK. We were not all born to be princes or princesses as imagined after all.

But things could be much more terrible for the ordinary. “On the back of a courser sits the numb, on the sack of the coarser, the beauty and the dumb.” You’ve probably heard about the Chinese proverb before, or a similar version in a different culture. Have you ever thought of the possibility that there isn’t anything called fairness in this freaking world, especially in the realm of love? Some have struggled for a lifetime, yet they didn’t find the one they’ve been longing for since a child. Some are always loved by many, but they never cherish the ones beside. If landslide do happen someday in the future, I hope all of them buried. But curse word never functions well in this case, isn’t it?

Landslide tells us something about change. People grow; love fades; and a high hill collapses. Someday in the past or the future, we have said or will have uttered the same thing: “I’ve built my life around you.” But sincerely I hope that the moment when you’re saying stupid things like that, you are happy, instead of being regretful, or wrapped with sorrows. As a special species on this planet, we’re truly weird in our own way. Some desperately long for changes, feeling they were trapped in an unpleasant situation. Some deem it a nightmare to change anything in their current life, not even the slightest bit. Is it really possible to bring everything down with a landslide? I don’t know what’s in the mind of the lyrics writer, but it seems that this guy might have already undergone something quite disturbing.

I want to make up a story at the end of this meaningless nonsense. Once upon a time, there was this little girl who sold matches on a cold winter night. It’s the Christmas Eve, but still nobody had bought any matches from the poor little girl, not even a single piece. She felt hungry and cold, and her bare feet was frozen into a horribly purple color. Instead of lighting a match to warm herself, she just put aside all the matches on the snowy ground, gave everyone on the street the middle finger, and shouted out: “eat my fart, suckers!” Now, that’s how should a landslide look like: unexpected but thrilling, right at your hideous face!