Atom Bomb of Sadness

I’ve been trying to write this for the last few days and I just haven’t been able to bring myself to do it. I just kept breaking down. There was just too much sadness. In trying to find the right words to discuss my devastation, I shed so many tears that even the Word document on my laptop somehow got soaked and I had to update my operating system.

 

You know what I’m talking about. It’s Adele’s new single.

 

I can say without exaggeration that it’s the saddest thing that ever happened in modern history. It’s as if they shot Old Yeller during the saddest part of Princess Diana’s funeral. It’s sadder than a mash-up of commercials for St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital and Sarah McLachlan pet adoptions. It’s like the Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb of sadness on everyone in the world and that bomb was the sound of Adele’s wailing voice shattered into 8 billion pieces but each piece somehow has the same amount of sadness as the whole.

 

I mean, you thought “Someone Like You” made you collapse into a pit of despair and stalking? The new one makes that sound like “Everything Is Awesome” from the Lego Movie. You think you sighed a billion sighs over lost love when you listened to “Hello”? This new song will have you sigh so hard, your esophagus will bleed and you’ll need an oxygen tank. You think you know sadness, just from deaths and other heartbreaks in your own life? Nah. Baby, you ain’t heard nothin’ yet.

 

I had a hard time even listening to Adele’s latest. Just brushing my fingers past the play button on my phone put a lump the size of Greenland in my throat. I finally pulled myself together enough to push play and when I heard the first few notes, I was sobbing—just sobbing. Crying ugly. Big, whooping, honking, embarrassing tears. It was like being in permanent therapy and having every breakthrough at once. After a year and half of tragedy and isolation, every single person in the world needed this catharsis.

 

Anyway, it took me all weekend to listen to the song since my keening would drown out the music and I’d have to start again. This was inconvenient since I went to a remote spot in the woods to listen so I could just keep collapsing to my knees and screaming, so nobody would be around to call the cops. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to listen to it at home.

 

Man, if we’re this emotional now, can you imagine a whole album of this? A whole album of sad ballads by Adele?! We’re going to be so dehydrated from crying, we’ll need an IV. This song and album will definitely sweep the Grammys. Of course, we may have a hard time hearing the winner’s name through all that sobbing and howling by the announcers. Maybe they could hire robots to announce. But then the emotions of the music would cause the robots to have self-awareness, and then they’d cry, too.

 

There is simply no way to overstate any of this. Every chord is a family member’s funeral. I am proud to lend my voice to those on social media who are expressing the hysterical tears that come with any new Adele song. But my review is the most florid! Notice me! Pay attention to me! Push me to the top of the Google search results! SOB.