Growth

I haven't written in a good long while. I've been letting my life sit if you will, or maybe even more appropriately, I've been letting my life stew. I bought my first place, and I furnished it with things that did not need to be assembled. Although after watching those moving guys get it all up my narrow staircase, I sure felt exhausted, and missed those boxes from overstock.com.

I got engaged, and learned what it feels like to have something sparkly on a ring finger. And not too far after that I became disengaged. So, I threw away the bridal magazines and stopped returning the vendor's phone calls. I told my mom to please subtly tell the thousands of people she was going to invite that the wedding was off. And I felt that those were the least of my losses.

Sometimes, on nights like tonight I sit alone and think. I'm free to be as zombie-like as I please, I'm not forced to animate for the pleasure of socialization or to avoid the inquiry of my superiors. No, tonight I sit alone and think, and while I do it, I dig back into the recesses of my brain for the echos of my own life soundtrack and came up with this.

This is a very dear friend of mine who I would lose to jubilation in her own mental illness. We are 16, and burning incense in my room to cover up the smell of the butts of my mother's Virginia Slims. We are laying in bed, as only friends can do before it gets past the age where your boyfriends want you to describe what you were doing in lascivious detail. Because when you are best friends all you have to do is lie there and giggle at the thought of Sinead slaying a dragon.

I think of a guy friend from high school. For some reason we would randomly go to his gay father's house and have lunch with him and his partner, Eric. Eric lent me the CD. I think he's dead now, but it doesn't matter. His face was already far away by the time I left my town behind for school. His CD was the same one I listened to with my friend. She still cuts her hair with shears and burns herself with cigarettes. I wish she would come back to life, even if we don't talk anymore.

I myself was once in Dublin in a rainstorm with an Irish boy named Paul. In one summer I dated three Irish boys who were all named Paul. This became very confusing for one of my housemates whose cell they would call. But then, three of my housemates were named Barry. I guess name books in Ireland are really more like pamphlets.

Anyway, it's not really walking with Paul through the Dublin rainstorm that I remember so much as waiting on him to come back to go with me to the airport where I was leaving Ireland for (so far) good. He was going to head back from classes to go. It began pouring, and I waited until the last minute to call a cab. As I got into the car, still hoping he'd wheel up, I slammed the side of my head so hard against the top of the cab that it brought tears to my eyes. And somehow this song trickled in and out with the tears of pain from my astonishing self-injury. I never saw him again, of course.

Tonight this song trickles in again. It's about being in love and then not. About wanting to escape it and then wanting it so deep inside of you that you feel it tickling your liver. It's about remembering that there was a time when something as simple as a song gave you such sublime hope, such a certainty about the future, such a meaning to the masses. It's fleeting, but it's still there all the same.

Enjoy. And close your eyes to avoid the hideous 80s video effects.