How it Ends

If you’re driving fast enough to have the ambient noise from the wind against your car, play Devotchka’s How It Ends full blast. The way this song alters your perception of sound poignantly reminds me that this song was always meant for the moments in transition.

 

This song found me when I took a trip to Nashville on a college visit to the school I’d eventually attend. We were caught in a nasty rainstorm and our flight home was canceled, so my mom and I found a hotel to stay in overnight. With nothing else to do, we scrolled Pay Per View and found the movie Little Miss Sunshine. “I heard this was supposed to be good,” said my mom. She was always a savant when it came to movies and TV. 

 

I didn’t expect Little Miss Sunshine to so profoundly speak to me the way it did. At it roots, it’s a movie about a family of misfits that band together to help the youngest daughter go to a beauty pageant in California by taking a cross-country trek in their VW Bus. Tragedy unfolds throughout the entire movie but despite it, they continue to move forward by supporting each other through small gestures of kindness and closeness. 

 

At the time, I was going through my first of many “existential crises.” My family was going through it. I was a teenager learning about love, loss, and grief. I spent a lot of time away from home because I needed to space myself away from the things that were happening. When Little Miss Sunshine became available on DVD, I watched and cried to it every night for two months straight. At the time, it felt like compulsion. But now I know it’s because I needed a way to express my sadness, overwhelm, and hope for a better future when I lacked the words to express myself. It was a small release that got me through that day, and the next, till the day I those feelings ended and I could move on to whatever was meant for me next. 

 

Listening to How it Ends takes me to the last scene of the movie as the family drives off into the sunset in their VW Bus. They each lived through their own little troubles and took off into the great unknown despite it. How it Ends is about death. But it’s also about hope. And failure. And the moments between.