What Am I
Mon, 28 Apr 2008.
Cheers, darlin’. Here’s to you and your lover boy.
Cheers, darlin’. I get years to wait ’round for you.
Cheers, darlin’. I got your wedding bells in my ear.
Cheers, darlin’. You gave me three cigarettes to smoke my tears away.
The singer’s voice rasps through the speakers of my old Mazda hatchback; it’s a slow, distorted melody of self-torturing. I drive quietly and automatically, letting the orange streetlights strobe across the windscreen. She sits in the passenger seat, perhaps wondering why this other girl had such a grip on me.
“I got so jealous when she met someone else,” I volunteer.
She nods.
“Have I played you this song before? It’s my favorite song of the moment and I guess it’s appropriate. He’s toasting the girl that he likes and her new boyfriend. He’s devastated but he has no plans to get over her.”
More nodding.
What follows is a long silence. I don’t waste any more time trying to articulate my feelings; I let the song wash over me. The song grows in distortion, the rasping is replaced with an undignified wailing, violins enter and it becomes a cacophony.
“But… is she happy?”
There’s optimism in her voice; she expects me to wish the best for people. That’s not the point, is it? The point is I’m dying and this other girl is the opposite of dying. She’s oblivious to me. I’m torturing myself over her and I’m torturing my friend in the passenger seat and she’s too busy to even notice. Such imbalance should not exist in this world, things should be fair and maybe I don’t deserve to be happy but I wish she could feel just a slice of this. She should know, right?
Balance is something I strive for in just about everything. Unfortunately, there’s no way to make outside things balanced. None. We can only try to keep a fair and balanced mentality within ourselves and hope for the best.
in a perfect world where we could all not feel human emotions the way we do, we would just be happy for people even if the happiness existed in a place we didn’t.
but. this is clearly not a perfect world - and so no, its not really the point.
i loved this piece jack
Ah, I know this feeling. You illustrated it very nicely. Sometimes I think we like the self-torture. So many songs sound better when they’re listen to with a broken heart.
There’s nothing worse than a song that reminds you of a love gone lost.