I know I'm not going to be doing myself any favours with this comparison, but Leonard Cohen wrote 80 verses to Hallelujah before settling on the final five. Sometimes the results of our labour justify the lengths we go to to get there. This is not one of those times.

I am so tired of this song cluttering the worktable in my mind, but I am not yet ready for it to be gone.

It was meant to be for my dad - in case that wasn't obvious - and that's how the problem began. Ever eager, as I am, to fling every egg I can find into the closest basket I have to hand, I decided that this song was The Song. Capital T, Capital S. That it would be where I digest all of those undesirable emotions all at once. And it felt healthy even, at the time, to have somewhere to put them, somewhere they could be herded together and ringfenced.

I dove into the process like I always do - smug and confident that I would be able to hold my breath and reach the bottom and bring something beautiful back to show everyone, and then it would be done, and I wouldn't have to think about this anymore, and I wouldn't have to feel like this anymore. But it's been two years now, and I don't feel like I've come up for air once, since the first demo, which was written and recorded on my phone the morning before the funeral, and I was rewriting it in my head less than two hours later, during the funeral service.

There's a theory for this. Or a term, rather. It's called 'dissociation'. It's a coping mechanism. Something we do when we can't bring ourselves to lift our heads and look directly at the monster barrelling out of the dark toward us.

Here's another theory, actually. If emotions can be boiled down to electrical signals bouncing around in the brain, then it follows that they are a part of the natural world - and therefore, have to obey the same laws as the natural world. The first law of thermodynamics states that energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be transformed, and I barely fucking cried when my father died.

Where are all those emotions? If they have not been destroyed, then where have they gone?

Reciever Of Wreck is not just a song, I think. It's an external hard drive for the feelings I can't bear to have close to me. And it will be effective for as long as I keep working on it, I believe. As long as I keep coming back every few months to push my grief another metaphor deep, until eventually even I start to forget what I walked up into the field that January morning to bury.

This is something I have to decide. I can write and rewrite and rererewrite, but the song is never going to feel complete. One day I'm just going to have to stop. But even then, I can't just put my guitar down and walk away. I'm in far too deep for that. I don't think I get to feel like it's done, truly, until this song, and everything locked inside it, has been released. And maybe then, maybe, I can start the actual process of gathering up those emotions and finding a place for them.

In me this time. Where they belong.