Chapter 16 | "Soma” by Smashing Pumpkins

I'm all by myself

As I've always felt

I'll betray myself

To anyone lost

Anyone but you

I had just graduated high school and was about to start my first year as a college student at UMass Boston when Smashing Pumpkins released their second album, Siamese Dream. Having worn gish out to the point of needing to buy another copy of it because the sound had begun to degrade with frequent runs through, I was ecstatic to have new material from them. I had heard “Cherub Rock” on the radio, and I was fucking in for this album.

As I often did with new albums, I listened to it start to finish several times. The first time through gave me first impressions with subsequent listenings revealing which songs stood out as favorites, once that baseline familiarity had been established. On rare occasions, a first listen would reveal an instant favorite with no follow up necessary.

“Soma” was one of those.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHLDcJ7dVSQ

From its hypnotic lullaby intro to its floaty, dreamlike verses to when the tension finally releases as the bridge transitions from a delicate, hesitant uncertainty to a crushing, decisive final revelation…”Soma” was the full package.

It became my own personal anthem for that period in my life, when I was several years removed from my first love and several years ahead of my next, and last love.

In the space that lingered between the two, I was alone. Sometimes I felt the weight of that loneliness, but mostly I felt... untethered. There's a difference, though it took me years to understand it.  

Lonely felt stuck and helpless to do anything to change it. Untethered was more like floating, unmoored from the gravity that another person provides. I had friends. I had music. I had the particular freedom of someone with nowhere specific to be and no one waiting for her to get there.

But I also had "Soma" on repeat.

There's something Billy Corgan does in that song that I've never heard anyone else quite replicate — the way the quiet parts aren't really quiet at all. They're coiled. Every delicate guitar figure and whispered lyric feels like it's holding its breath, waiting for permission to become something enormous. And then it does. The bridge doesn't just crescendo — it confesses. It sounds like someone who has been holding something in for years finally letting it go all at once, in the middle of a room, whether anyone is listening or not.

That's what being alone at nineteen felt like to me. Not a confession to anyone. Just a reckoning with myself.

I listened to Siamese Dream walking the streets of Dorchester and Southie, on the Red Line into downtown, sitting in the back of lectures I was only half paying attention to. "Soma" in particular became the soundtrack to a specific kind of introspection that I don't think I could have accessed any other way — the kind that only lives at the intersection of isolation and a perfect song.

I didn't know then that I was becoming someone. I just knew that this song understood it before I did.

Autumn's Playlist: The Answer You Didn't Want

Chapter 16 is the shortest chapter in the book. It's also one of the most devastating.

It takes place on New Year's Day, 1996—the morning after Madison Square Garden. Though I could write a whole blog post about that, I don’t want to spoil the story for anyone who hasn’t read it yet.

What I will say is that this chapter’s song has to be "Soma.” It doesn't offer comfort. It doesn't promise things get better. It doesn't try to fix anything. It just sits with you in that hollow space and says: This is what it feels like.

The dreamlike verses that keep you suspended in uncertainty.

The bridge that forces you to face what you've been avoiding.

The quiet devastation of knowing something you can't unknow.

Sometimes closure doesn't feel like relief; it feels like loss.

That's Chapter 16.