“Here’s Where The Story Ends,” the first single by The Sundays, was the only song I’d ever heard by them when I bought their first album. In my pre-teen and early teenage years, I went to a summer camp for two weeks every year that was run by the church my family belonged to. The majority of the kids who went to that camp were from the Virginia Beach area, while I was from a sheltered suburb 45 minutes south of Richmond (where I live now). The kids at the camp were always way more concerned with being cool than I was, and they made me feel hopelessly out of step with my ignorance of things like surfing and cool tennis shoes. I don’t think I really gained much from all the inadequacy the “cool kids” at summer camp always made me feel (though I didn’t really question it, either—being uncool was then, and is now, my lot in life), but I did get lucky enough to hear some of the music they were into that hadn’t made it onto my radar. The Sundays were the best of the bands I found through my summer camp days, and it happened because this song was played at a dance. Yeah, we had dances. No, I didn’t dance. I was a wallflower, and there were no perks that I could find.
Months later, I could still remember the chorus of this song, and that’s what led me to buy this album. “It’s that little souvenir of a terrible year that makes my eyes grow sore,” was an appropriate line to identify with summer camp. I try to be nostalgic for it now, but the truth is that most of the time while I was there, I was not having much fun. It wasn’t just about unrequited love, the way this song is, it was about unrequited friendship. Feeling uncool and unwanted is no way to go through adolescence. But the cool kids passed along a lot of different music to me, not just The Sundays but The Smiths and The Cure and a lot of other bands that seem like they probably resonated more for me than for them. I mean, unless we were all just putting on a facade, and none of us really knew how to be cool. Which is probably the real truth.
This song, to me, is a soundtrack to years spent alone, “on the outside” as Harriet Wheeler sings. I know what it means to feel like everything you want to say is wrong. I know how it feels to take refuge in cynicism to try and shelter yourself from the pain of unfulfilled expectations and dashed hopes. Some days I feel like I have the distance to smile at those old memories, but there are other times when they feel close enough to touch. I feel like I’m still the same adolescent misfit I always was, and if my adulthood isn’t a dream I’m going to wake up from and be back in the 9th grade, well, it’s also no happier, no more free of emotional turmoil. And all of these stories end the same way.
