Source Decay

The line about the Austin post office box isn't about the narrator's earlier travels with his former companion. It's about his weekly trips to Austin to check for the postcards she sends there - to the post office box they once shared when they lived in the city together - the last address she has for him.

Clearly, the couple lived together in Austin. Although the song doesn't say so explicitly, one gets the feeling that the person sending the postcards split up with the narrator and left him in Bangkok. There's a powerful image of him standing on a railroad platform, watching her train leave, as she continues her travels without him - perhaps in some effort at escapism.

She continues to send him postcards as she travels - and, sifting through the postcards - a list, essentially, of the destinations she's passed him up for - he wracks his brain looking for a rationale: a reason for her to have left; a motive. He despairs at never finding one.

The song never actually says that the narrator and the postcard-sender were in a romantic relationship. But I think we're justified in inferring that they were: he feels his heart break, his bitter smile at having been deserted, his promise always to be honest (to 'tell her what he knows') - and the fact that her absence so obsesses him that he describes himself as a 'hostage', and wishes he could escape by driving on a never-ending freeway. (I think the only line that suggests they were anything but romantic - 'from my old best friend' - merely alludes to the relationship's familiar closeness.)

There's also evidence that the sense of malice, or at least careless teasing, that he detects in her correspondence (though it's more of a respondence, to steal a line from Lionel Shriver) is well-placed: in the intervening decades, she's never communicated in a method that would allow him to reply. One imagines that she mails him either to delude herself into thinking she hasn't deserted him, or because she thinks that his hearing from her might comfort him - either way, she can't quite bear to hear back from him. And surely she must know that the postcards - in which she invites him to reminisce (she asks what he remembers) - are, indeed, torturous.

Whatever her motive, I'm always transported back to the image of him on the railroad platform, watching her receed toward the sea. I wonder if he has an inkling that she'll haunt him forever. I wonder if he already knows that he'll let her.