sounds of settling

It has been almost a year since I left downtown, and all the memories and heartache attached to it and what went down in that tower. Now we are different people and you are off the deep end, I feel. It isn’t my fault, though sometimes I cry at night and find myself reaching for your hip in the dark. I wake up next to a man I hardly know, and at the same time know too well. A man who is bullying me into loving him, and I’m trying really, really, really hard.  I’m trying to come to peace with the fact that I had my turn, we had our time and it was perfect. I buried that love when you expired, and let me go, and most of the time I know it’s over and I’m done grieving the loss of me. So why do I look down the barrel of the rest of my life with a fear and deep remorse that your face won’t be on the other side of this darkness? I’m coming to peace with the fact that we ran it into the ground, and I won’t ever be that lucky again. And now in the face of what could very well be the last man I ever give a chance to love me, I’m so sad. I’ll have to come up with a new definition of happiness. And that, my love, is your fault.

Damn you.

Cry, baby.

I’m never not going to be in love with him.

Oh it kills

Mates of State- Blue and Gold Print

So long lost love
I haven’t forgotten you just yet
I hung your picture before I knew
Next to scenes set in golden hues
Your face is still drifting inside my head
The weight is gone
Heavy words that I could have said

I sang instead
When other girls only cried
I call it grace
I am a mindless child

But I said, he’s treating me right
I said, he’s treating me right

You’re gone
What’s left?
Memories of greater days just hang
Look on, you say
Build together the obvious clues
Taught you
Skip the series of laid out rules

Go sing outside
As clouds raining spark the light
Thats how we met
Was it the greatest day of this life.

I said, he’s treating me right
I said, he’s treating me right

We’re just a little bit lost
Inside our houses
We’re just a little unkept
Out in the streets

And I won’t ever pass up a second to tell you replacement’s a myth
Cause I know when the kids are all grown
We will still have this blue and gold print

ware of your personal longing

I looked you in the face and you were there. I touched you, and you were there. You were sitting next to me like you always had, but I had lost you ages ago. I’m better now, I say that every morning. I’m better, now. Now I’m better. But you can see through me, I’m sure. I’m poised, sitting still. I swallowed all of the pills that turn normal girls into crazy, desperate, clawing monsters and the fire has died down, the buzz has worn off by now and I’m sitting here, safe, drained. I go through each day like this. If you had met me now instead of years ago, you’d be disgusted, I think. Nothing burns anymore, only heavy, glowing coals sit in the pit of my stomach and I can’t feel anything for anyone and I’m ashamed.
I’m ashamed I did this.

It makes my head spin, the thought of it. Why. Why. Why. Because.

It’s dark down here.

[L]

It was ugly. You should’ve seen me. Every morning before 8am I walked out of the tower into the street. I called this the “gauntlet”. Most of the winter it had been pouring rain, and the homeless men in wheelchairs would still try and sell me pills on my walk to the subway. I took this part of my life for granted, as I don’t get to feel, taste, smell the city this way anymore. And like most of my situation at the time, I romanticized it, I was lost and hungry and cold and wet, but at least I was something, wasn’t I? Wasn’t I something?

It was probably afternoon, but the sky had been gray and raining for weeks, making time an arbitrary thing. It could have been dawn. You were outside in the rain, chopping firewood in the yard with your shirt off, cigarette hanging from your lips. I watched you from the window by the fireplace.

You were something.

[T]

The strangeness about the life we shared was found in our perfectly balanced push and pull, in our ability to exist completely equally in each other at all times. Whether it be close to nothing on the first day we met when you drove clear across the Imperial Valley to pick me up and you were aloof, and I was so brave- or completely, when my attention belonged to you and yours to me, not because we were in love but just because nobody else was more important at any given moment.

The intensity levels rose and fell, but romance was never in the picture. There were the cold nights I drove to your apartment in the East Village and did rows of cocaine on your windowsill while you made the bed and you took me to the Embarcadero and watched me drink Sparks and tell long winded stories about nothing that went nowhere.

Eventually, we would gracefully fall out of touch and after two or three years I would hit rock bottom and show up at your door, bruised and shaken. We’d get some pizza and I would drop you off at school and you’d send me back up to Orange County to clean myself up, which I did. Thanks for that.

Bazan returns to LA, Brings us to Tears

My old man swore that Hell would have no flame…

Find the review at CultureMob.