an exploration of Mitski's "First Love / Late Spring"
written by jane le
EDITED BY PAT BUI
CONTENT WARNING: This article mentions and discusses the topic of suicide. We do not recommend you reading the article if you are not comfortable with such topic or you are under the age of 15 as it could trigger negative emotions.
It would be easier if life was a constant state of pain and misery, so why must you plague my mind with love? If I were to never have felt pleasure or desire, it wouldn’t be so troublesome to live in despair. It was only when you disturbed my mind with the fleeting taste of happiness, that I could no longer return to my previous state of endless agony. As long as I knew that a feeling of pure bliss existed in this life, I would forever chase the temporary pleasures. “So please hurry… leave me.”
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First Love / Late Spring by Japanese American indie pop artist, Mitski, explores the fear of letting yourself fall in love. No one would be afraid of falling if they didn’t know how it hurt to land - it is the same with love. If we never knew how a heartbreak felt, we wouldn’t hesitate to love in the first place. Whilst a first love is oh-so-beautiful, a high that no drug could replicate, it is also painful and tedious. The words “Late Spring” highlight the end of the initial ‘puppy love’ of a relationship and the realisation that like spring, it does not last. Flowers bloom, but ultimately, the green of a spring day will melt into a harsh and cold winter. Mitski uses the metaphor of a late spring to describe her first love and its eventual decline.
At the start of the song, Mitski states that lately, she has been “crying like a tall child”, suggesting that she hasn’t cried in this manner since her early childhood and sees herself as childish and foolish for doing so. The term ‘tall child’ implies that she hosts a child-like maturity in her adult body, which also infers the feeling of an unfulfilled childhood and a regret of growing up. Mitski continues to use the phrase ‘tall child’ later in Verse 2 when she sings, “And I was so young when I behaved twenty-five. Yet now I find I’ve grown into a tall child." By likening herself to the image of an overgrown child, Mitski illustrates her high dependency on her partner as similar to how a child is to a parent, and questions if a relationship of this nature is worth it.
Mitski features a line in the chorus, singing, “So please hurry leave me, I can't breathe. Please don't say you love me, 胸がはち切れそうで (my heart is going to burst out of my chest)”. Here Mitski asks her partner to leave her before she is further attached to them and so that she can be relieved of the overwhelming feelings she has for them. She expresses worry about them saying they love her as it would only solidify her emotions and make the relationship more genuine, which is a terrifying prospect to her. Mitski simultaneously asks her partner to not say a word as she sings “One word from you and I would jump off of this ledge I’m on. Baby, tell me “don’t” so I can crawl back in”, yet pleads them to ask for her back as though she is testing the boundaries of her partner’s love and its conditions. Mitski shows that she would do anything for her partner, and even resort to attempting suicide so she can witness her partner talking her out of it as she craves her partner’s validation. Eventually, Mitski’s love for this person is so intense that it manifests into a fear of abandonment, creating a one-sided love that in turn, results in the destruction of their relationship.
Over the progression of this track, Mitski crosses and challenges the fine lines of several themes; between late spring and summer, casual love and deep intimacy, and the feeling of being old and young. These are perhaps her "ledges", in which she struggles to decide between the two extremes and finally let go. However, another interpretation can be linked back to the theme of the feeling of being young, reminiscent of being asked the question ‘if your friend jumped off a bridge, would you jump too?’ as a child. Yet, in her position, this isn’t mutual and instead, Mitski is willing to die for the whims of the person she is devoted to. By manipulating the word ‘ledge’ to represent both physical and abstract concepts, Mitski emphasises the double edge of her sword - her indecisiveness to commit suicide and her willingness to die in the name of love.
Mitski regularly draws back to the theme of being a child throughout First Love / Late Spring. As she sings, “And I don't wanna go home yet. Let me walk to the top of the big night sky,” she expresses the nostalgia of a child begging their parents to not go home yet and letting them continue to play. This discloses that Mitski does not want the feeling of pure, innocent love to end and her solution for it to never end, is to commit suicide, as her walking “on top of the big night sky” signifies that she is going into heaven. Through utilising the nostalgia of a child's playtime, Mitski compares it to the nature of her first love and highlights the lengths she would go to preserve that feeling.
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