Somewhere in a Stranger's Video
I was not looking for you.
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Somewhere in a Stranger's Video
This original emotional pop ballad is about a woman who recognises her childhood best friend in a stranger's video, and cannot do a single thing about it.
The song comes from a post in r/TrueOffMyChest by a woman in her thirties, scrolling late at night. A video plays of someone in the UK handing out coats and food to people living on the street. One of the women being filmed looks familiar, and then she says her name, and the poster's stomach drops.
They were thirteen once. They built a ouija board out of a cereal box at a sleepover, swapped shirts when one of them spilled food down her front, and saw every Twilight film together. Then the poster's parents split and her mother moved them to another country. She came back at twenty-five. Her friend had already deleted her social media, and the two of them had simply drifted.
In the video, the friend talks about her drug addiction and about the work she does for money. Her words slur, her shoulders will not keep still, and there are scars up her arms. The poster watches from a warm house, with a husband and a child asleep upstairs.
What she is left with is several feelings at once: shock, guilt, grief, confusion. She does not know whether it is her place to reach out to someone she has not spoken to in years. She does not know what she would even say. She has sent a message to the person who filmed the video, and nothing has come back yet.
The song is a slow piano ballad that moves at a walking pace. Fingerpicked guitar and bare piano carry the verses; strings and light percussion arrive at the first chorus and step back out of it. The second pre-chorus is nearly empty. The bridge drops away to piano and voice, the last chorus opens all the way up, and a solo piano takes the ending. The chorus turns on the plainest line in the song: I can't reach through the screen.
Listen on the nights you go looking for someone you lost and find them somewhere you were not ready for; when your own life worked out and someone you loved is still out in the cold; or any time you have had to ask whether it is your place to try.
Content note: homelessness, addiction, and sex work.
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