"this modern love breaks me"

As a medicine for Seasonally Affective Disorder, a day in the darkroom doesn't rank so highly. Today's soundtrack really did save my life though, so it gets more thought than my photos of the day.

Bloc Party's 'Modern Love' trips with tension. The tension is between knowing what you should do but being unable to match that with what you feel, confessions of fragility when an act of strength is required or expected, desperation to be understood and not left emotionally floundering alone - it's all there:

"this modern love breaks me"

In daring honesty, I can think of people I would play that song to, even very recently, because the lyrics and stream of guitar chords and palpitatious rhythm articulate a confusion between love and fear way better than any of my tongue-tied efforts.

Sometimes a darkroom is a kind of secret shelter where ideas and thoughts have the privacy and time they need to emerge. But today, there I was, alone under safe light, with stinky chemicals twisting up through the air onto my clothes and face, and no sense of purpose-filled time except that images did appear in the trays. Shut off like this away from daylight and people I - unusually - felt the fear of isolation sneak in, the old opportunist, perhaps to do with recent situations where I wasn't sure if I'd done or said the right thing. Almost as though the soundtrack sensed things couldn't continue like that, it powered itself out, and then, there, it had all been said, triumphant in its beautiful but painful honesty. I didn't feel alone anymore, and I also felt better for those recent times when I have braved being honest.

Find a song that says it better than you can and play it for someone else.