I breathe in

The first moments of falling happened on your father's porch. You told me how special it felt to have someone to bounce your travels off of like a radar at home base...and I'd never thought of myself as someone's home before.  And I faintly recognized the humming in my ears and the surging fullness as signs that I was now irreparably changed by you, come what may. Everyone thought I was crazy as I floated through the city high on you and the prospect of our future.  And maybe a part of me believed them and knew that we hadn't yet earned this kind of reckless abandon to love and move and make the big decisions.  We thought we were fooling fate; that we were more than, better than, different than.  But we weren't.  We were human.

The holes in us revealed themselves as they're wont to do with any two strangers discovering each other in life for the first time.  But instead of embracing our unknowns and unraveling our uncertainties, we each built our walls and committed our crimes. 

And now this flood flows from a ride with your album.  Dark winding roads are lining up with your dark winding lyrics and they fuel my hatred and my desire to forgive and my deep sadness from this loss. Have you lived through this specific destruction before, or am I just willing the instruments and the pain in your voice to sound like us?  I'm choosing to remember this same car ride with you on this very road at this very hour just 5 weeks ago as happy, but my memory is a liar lately.  Our fray had already begun.

I've since woken up morning after morning and braced myself for the waiting.  The waiting for someone to falter so we can once again pinpoint the wrongness that validates our own decisions; each of us clinging to our martyred identities to assuage ourselves or to use as incriminating evidence in telling friends and family of our failure.  Will we speak today and battle through our weighted pauses, or will I fling an accusation at you just to see how it feels when it leaves my tongue - a tasty victory until the emptiness behind it hits.  Will we remain silent, I in my determination to forget, while you move slowly through the streets, sitting in your bed sparingly to avoid the corner of your room where the wifi is shitty, writing... or thinking of writing and finding nothing there.  Or maybe you find too much. Maybe your head is heavy with the Next step, unsure of what shape Next will take, who Next will be, where Next will exist; selfishly indulgent in your well-being, but not knowing it's face.  

I'm struggling to remember you and forget you at the same time.  Like the quiet sadness in a layer of your being veiled by your eyes...the same place where I imagine your music is born ...that little untouchable part of you that was always just out of reach to me.  Maybe I was selfish to want all of you - to leave no stone unturned.  Because maybe there are things humans are incapable of sharing, and we have to just trust and love the things we can.

 The tearing of myself from limb to limb in the process to process has made me realize that it's not about wanting all of you, it's about a truth in wanting all FOR you. Because even if I can't be the one to remind you up close every day of the beauty you offer the world, I still believe in it.  And I'll continue to send love to you from wherever I stand.