Who could catch their breath at a crime scene?
Born and raised to keep dark findings in my mind
Numbers blurring, streets are feeling different
Losing track of all of God's indifference
Who gets by? (Oh, oh, oh)
Well, walking with a ghost, that shit was tearing me to shreds
I had never known my name until you spoke it from your chest
Yes, the heavens opened up and pulled me in, I stared and said, "Oh, yeah"
-The Bleachers, "You and Forever" Everyone for Ten Minutes (2026)
By Tom Swift
February 14, 2026
You almost hit the skip button when the first song appears. You don’t recognize the title.
You think to hit skip again when the initial notes sound somber.
You're here to move. You’re here to take more literal steps in your recovery. You're here so the machine will keep you at a steady pace, help you move faster than you could on a winter sidewalk. You want to be overtaken by sound that you know — sound that makes this turn on the treadmill into something of a dance. Music being the greatest performance-enhancing drug there is.
You read the title again — "You and Forever" — and give it a chance. (You will later learn this is a days-old single — why you didn’t know the title despite the go-to Bleachers station on your streamer.)
The tone of the tune shifts and, while you don't follow all of what the Bleachers are crooning about on first listen, suddenly what arouses feels right.
That's the thing about music: it can turn any moment into a movie. The input — sometimes the lyrics, sometimes the melody, often a combination — melds with the narratives filed in your mind. Narratives stimulated by the movement of your body.
There are only three treadmills in the recreation center and one of them isn’t in service. You like that they face windows that overlook a soccer field. You joined expressly to help you recover from surgery over the winter months. In walking sessions past, you stood on this treadmill, or the one next to it, and observed airplanes that veered skyward from the runway of the airport three miles down the road. At various moments you imagined the plane trajectories matched your own.
Sometimes you have wanted this too much. You have wanted to be building, growing, progressing too fast. Even though this feels like a new you — the surgery a demarcation point; physical repair and emotional renewal — you have wanted desperately to feel, well, like the old you.
The last time you were here the airplanes that entered your awareness did not ascend and did not descend but rather moved in a straight line across the horizon. This, too, seemed to align: Of late, after another flare up probably caused by too much upward movement, you have needed to hold steady. Not still. Not down. Not up. Steady.
As you now groove with this new Bleachers tune — rather than hit skip, you have fingered the thumbs-up — a plane appears.
Straight and steady.
Before long, a pair of white birds fly low over the soccer field. The second bird is not more than a bird body length, maybe two, behind the first. They keep that distance. They do not rise, do not fall. They fly along an imaginary rope.
Straight and steady.
Not long after this, farther in the distance — at what appears from your field of view to be just beyond the goal posts at the far edge of the field — a pair of black birds, coming from the direction the white birds exited, also fly close together and, yes, also straight and steady.
A sense comes over you to not hide it any more. Not to explain it any more. It seems foolish to ever ask again if it’s OK to be this way. If it makes sense to trust this. To ask if, in fact, you’re not crazy. If the brain scans you haven't had but which surely would deliver results that speak to the fear that thinks your experience isn’t real if it’s not test-valid reality. You don’t want so much as to touch the pan that’s on the stove that’s plugged into the wall that is in the house that’s in the city that’s in the the state that’s in the country that’s so much as next to the country where delusion resides.
No doubt, the really smart people you listen to, talk to, read, and respect would label what you feel right now walking on this treadmill, buds in your ears, birds in your eyes — this pleasurable intersection of the senses — as merely the result of material matter interpretations. Probably endorphins or oxytocin is involved. They wouldn’t call it delusion; no, that’s too clinical and too unkind. But rather it's a fabrication of the brain that we as humans can’t help but experience from time to time. We are very often caught fooling ourselves. Many books have said this.
To you, the alignment you sense between the human-made machines, creatures of the natural world, your own intentions and history, juxtaposed by art making similar statements (more on the song in a second) creates what feels like bankable truth. The answers to personal questions you form in your so-called rational mind ... very often ... not so much.
Fuck everything that I've been told 'cause I just saw the heavens open up
And forever
Darling, just you and forever
Now it's just you and forever
The birds flew in pairs. They were decidedly together. Apart from all others.
You and Forever is about a romantic coupling; it’s not a trivial relationship, not a mere fling. It’s a song about the discovery of a love that rescues a man from trauma. This man newly realizes that what he’s found gives him, maybe for the first time, deep meaning he didn’t know was possible in such a flawed world.
The oft-repeated refrain from which the title comes strikes me as both a literal intention — the man wants to move beyond his grief (easier said than done, even if the woman is the right one) and commit fully to her — nothing else in life matters as much — that, in its repetition, also is an incantation. A thing we say over and over when what we feel is failed by language.
That this experience takes place on a day set aside to honor love — another word that's a stand in for feeling that language often can’t incapsulate — seems yet one more way in which all of the elements of this moment not only align with each other but also amplify each other.
Airplanes near an airport fly in a line. Birds pair in an open sky. Romance that is not common is embraced. A song that you don’t expect lands just right. Brokenness — physical and emotional — is healing. The past and the moment aren’t separate. You’re moving forward. Straight and steady. You think about explaining it all to someone but then you can’t, not really. In part you know that what you feel will soon pass — maybe it already has — and, besides, the rational mind fails here. So grand pronouncements don’t feel right just now. The only word that strikes is love. And the thing about is that it feels new.
