The line "I remembered you on trains/So now you're on every train I hear" always makes me think of the movie "Before Sunrise".
But the song is definitely about the way we remember people. Even the people we cared about the most, after enough time, fade away to nothing more than "whispers" and "reflections off a window". And it seems the person in the song blames himself for this loss. "I wished that you were gone/So now you're gone", and the repetition of "I turned you into...." He's put upon himself responsibility for the natural course of memory. It's as if he can't bear that fact that his memory of someone he loved so much can become so hazy, so he tells himself that's not normal, that it's something he's done and should be ashamed of.
The line "I remembered you on trains/So now you're on every train I hear" always makes me think of the movie "Before Sunrise".
But the song is definitely about the way we remember people. Even the people we cared about the most, after enough time, fade away to nothing more than "whispers" and "reflections off a window". And it seems the person in the song blames himself for this loss. "I wished that you were gone/So now you're gone", and the repetition of "I turned you into...." He's put upon himself responsibility for the natural course of memory. It's as if he can't bear that fact that his memory of someone he loved so much can become so hazy, so he tells himself that's not normal, that it's something he's done and should be ashamed of.