ALONE AGAIN (NATURALLY)

She hadn't felt this gloomy in weeks and then a shadow passed across her heart in the form of a song. But it wasn't any old song. It was the one that reminded her the most of her late father and it just so happened to be playing in the cafe where she'd been meditating on the millpond-like surface of her cup of black coffee.

Re-acquainted with the song for the first time since his death twelve months before, Lois suddenly began to form a montage of memories of her father like a detective who has suddenly amassed all the clues to an especially tough case at the end of a crime movie. When she thought back on all the times her dad would play this one particular song, she could now clearly pin point those key moments of his life that further set him on his lonely path to depression and isolation from the world at large.

Three decisive moments that were like hammerblows to his heart included his receiving the divorce papers in the post from her estranged mother, the cancellation of his book that was to be published and then, finally, the diagnosis of his illness.

For the past two decades of his life in which she'd grown from being a young girl to a young woman, he'd become increasingly withdrawn though never shirking from his responsibilities to provide for her. Working from home made it easier for him to avoid seeing people and so, though they shared many happy times together in their apartment sanctuary watching movies and cooking together, there was a red line he would never cross and it meant that she had to be his eyes and ears out beyond the door of their apartment.

What was it that he was afraid of all that time? At the funeral her auntie had already provided the answer.

"Your father was afraid of getting his heart broken again. Besides, he only loved one woman. Your mother."

Lois felt she had done everything within her power to try and encourage her father to fight the downward spiral thinking that so often goes hand in hand with heartbreak, professional rejection and then, finally, illness.

"Come on Dad. Think of Superman when he defeated Doomsday," she would often remind him, seeing it as completely rational to compare her father's struggles with that of Kal-El.

Instead of reading her bedtime stories as a young girl, her father would read her Marvel and DC comics where superheroes so often managed to win their battles against their adversaries. She'd hoped her dad could be like a superhero himself and recover his powers. But it wasn't the case and now in the shadow of losing him it was up to her to find the strength of a Superman or Wonder Woman to help rise above her own current human vulnerability.

To think that only yesterday
I was cheerful, bright and gay
Looking forward to who wouldn't do
The role I was about to play
But as if to knock me down
Reality came around
And without so much as a mere touch
Cut me into little pieces

As the song played on, she couldn't help feeling somehow hostile towards it. It was as if she felt it might have just further propagated her father's misery back then and helped him romanticise his own downfall somehow. She'd recently read on some personal development blog that all music was like a form of hypnosis/persuasion. Well, by that same metric, it could just as easily lead to your desperation as your motivation. Some nights, when she'd gone to bed, she could hear him playing the damn song on repeat whilst he nursed a large glass of whiskey in his hand. Now she thought about it, it seemed sort of sadistic. He had scolded her for cutting herself when she was a teenager, but hadn't he been doing similar listening to that damn song over and over at times of dark despair?

Angry at the power the music had over her right now, like a ghostly tormentor, she left her cup of coffee and tried to stop her brain from overthinking as tears fell from her eyes onto the pavement in little blotchy splashes.

Walking the streets in a blur, Lois vowed to herself that she would never play sad music ever again in her life and if she was in a public place where they were playing that shit, she would walk out instantly. No superhero should succumb to melancholy. It was worse than kryptonite to her mind. She imagined Superman being held captive by Lex Luthor with him playing the Gilbert O' Sullivan song on repeat. He was convinced he wouldn't have stood a chance.

The further away she got from the cafe, the less stressed she began to feel as she decided to take a late afternoon detour through the park.

Then somewhere in the near distance, she could hear a busker playing a miserable cover version of Radiohead's "No Surprises" and so she turned back, taking her more typical route back home.

"No way! You're not defeating me with your sad songs!" she whispered resolutely to herself under her breath.