Good-bye parties are bittersweet

much like good-byes themselves.

a fortress long abondoned by the warmth of laughter

Doe-eyed

unsatisfied.

We’re terrified of one another

and terrified of what that means

A Crackle in a Radio Song

Warm light when your eyes fill with laughter
Some animal lies in the pasture
Holes, in its throat where the blood was drawn
In its mouth where the tongue was torn
By your claws,
your claws,
your claws.

I woke from a dream; we were running
From every being that was hunting
But, we let them get ahead of us
We let them lie in wait for us
We’re fucked,
we’re fucked,
we’re fucked.

“In a Radio Song”

nineteenfortyfive

Sleep (I)

We’re driving in your car, and I’m so, so, tired. The clock display is broken, meaning that my only way of knowing the time is by what stores are still open. Rexall is closed. The parking lot is empty. The windows are dark. This means it is sometime after midnight. I’m exhausted, but I don’t want to go home. It’s not so much that I’m prolonging our precious time together, but rather dreading what comes after this. For all the times that you’ve only half-listened when I spoke, or woke me up just as I was finally drifting off to sleep, I’m not even sure whether this is worth it anymore. But for now, I’ll put up with all of your imperfections for the simple fact that I don’t want to go home.

“Please, take me anywhere, just not home.” I think to myself, it’s like that Smiths song: driving in your car, I never never want to go home.

Home is safety, and comfort, but it’s lonely. My bed is the most comfortable place in the world, but I can’t sleep in it. At four o’clock in the morning, when nothing is on TV except an endless loop of infomercials and crackling static, you realize that you are all by yourself. You flip channels mindlessly, searching for something better than what you have, but you never find it. Not at this time, anyway.

Eremophobia: an abnormal fear of loneliness.

It’s that feeling you get laying in bed at night. Sleep is lonely. Those are the times when my mind won’t stop running in circles, and I think about how hard it is to really love someone, and how much harder it is to forgive someone. But instead, right now, I’m doing all of this in your car, with the windows rolled down and the wind wrapping itself around my dangling arm. The world is asleep, and all I want is someone to drink this bottle of Kahlua with (God knows it isn’t you).

When I finally bring myself to look at you, your eyes are glazed over, shining from the glare of the streetlights. I wonder what’s going on behind your expressionless gaze. I wonder if you’re paying attention to driving. I wonder if you even care. If we crashed through the guardrail and sailed over the edge at this very second, what would your last thoughts be?

Oops, I forgot to feed the dog.
I left the lights on.

I’ll tell you mine, just in case you were wondering. I wrote you a letter once. Sometimes, I wish I had sent it. You know, it’s funny how feelings become an inconvenience. No one really cares about anyone else’s. I mean, what reason is there? You’re not going to benefit from listening to any of this, so you brush it aside. And I get that. I’m learning, slowly, how selfish we must be to protect ourselves. Survival is in our nature.

Every animal has a defence mechanism.
Turtles have shells. Squids eject ink. Deer have antlers.
Us humans, we shut down emotionally. Out of sight, out of mind.
If this were the case, maybe I could sleep.

Luck is on our side, I guess. None of this is going to happen tonight, keeping our guts and feelings and everything else inside us. Once I get to my door, I look back at you sitting in your car. After rummaging through your glove compartment, you pull out a beat up old piece of paper.

Did I leave that there?

Now you’re driving away, smiling and waving. Maybe you wouldn’t have smiled if you had known what it said.

Wake (II)

As long ago as this all happened, it’s as still fresh in my mind as it was the morning after. Fast forward weeks, months into the future, and here we are. This is what my life has become: an out-of-body experience with a filmic sort of quality. It’s nothing but a grainy image with a carefully constructed narrative played by amateur actors.

Pause. Play. Rewind. You can watch it as many times as you like, but there are no retakes.

They say you always want what you can’t have. Maybe this time they’re right. I’ve never felt so detached before, and I just want to go back to when you loved me. So here it is, my desperate and utterly impossible cry for help. Even if I could go back in time and pull that letter out of car, none of it would matter. The truth is that I only wrote down what you could never say. I put pen to paper, but you sealed the deal.

There will always be that special place in time that you can never get back to, no matter how hard you try. The reality is that life is continually evolving into something different each day, and you can never recapture those fleeting moments when the planets align and everything is as close to perfect as it will ever be. Nothing is ever as good as you remember it, anyway.

Maybe I need to stop living in the past.
Maybe I need to forget everything I thought I knew about happiness.
Maybe I need to start living again.

I need you like water in my lungs

Nova Scotia, July 08.

This story’s old but it goes on and on until we disappear
Calm me and let me taste the salt you breathed while you were underneath
I am the one who haunts your dreams of mountains sunk below the sea

Prologue

I’m not sure what this is going to be
(I’m not even sure if anyone will read this)

Possibly musings about my affinity for music (among other things; including but not limited to art, the ocean, hauntingly beautiful things, etc)

Or random bits of writing
Or photographs

I won’t make any promises

Life is subject to change without notice.