About feeling better…

So I’ve been listening to Regina Spektor’s song “Better” and wondering about the lyrics. I want to push my politics against this song so much.

I think it’s a song about coming out. The repeated lyrics of the song are about that thing that concerned parents do for their kids — kissing sore spots — because it’ll make the child feel better or at least a little less distressed. But the metaphor of someone having the ability to kiss her problems away goes beyond parental ties to romantic love, too. Everyone wants a partner who can kiss her troubles away… until that partner is someone she feels she can’t share with the world.

The two women in the song are so close that they’re practically joined by blood, similar to how a marriage bond and sex typically unites bloodlines and family lines between a man and a woman. But… the town sees blood ties as only blood. It doesn’t matter how close they are — they aren’t united in a way that others can see them. And even though one of them wants to speak up and out about it, one girl doesn’t even want to name it. She gets sadder and sadder about it.

Naturally Regina is playing the role of the insistent sister. She wants to make everything better with a kiss — except for the resistant sister, the kisses only hurt more because she feels she can’t say her name out loud to anyone, not even insistent sister Regina. So Regina tries to understand but she doesn’t, even though she cares. And the resistant sister builds a wall of pain that Regina tries to kiss and kiss away.

But what if kissing isn’t enough?

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