a litte salt - revisited.

crappy letter
Originally uploaded by less like math

Things in Rissaland have been really crazy lately. I feel like every aspect of my life has crashed down around me and then built back up and then crashed again, just in the last 72 hours. There are so many people that I want to help and be there for and have a positive impact on and I'm not sure that I'm accomplishing that with anyone.

Seeing as I refuse to emote about my personal life in this blog I'm instead posting something that I love and that makes me think and that I didn't write. The following was written by my Summer Anne and I hope she doesn't mind my posting it. (You don't......do you?) The first time I read this I really needed to read it and I feel like I really need to read it today and I feel like some of you guys might feel that way too.

a little salt


A boy we’ll never know who’s locked himself in a cabin says what we’ve been trying to for years now: “I told you to be patient; I told you to be fine; I told you to be balanced; I told you to be kind. Now all your love is wasted? Then who the hell was I? Now I'm breaking at the britches and at the end of all your lines” Yeah, that’s it. There’s a mistake I make all the time in which I think that if you love a song that’s in the same shape as my heart, you might start to understand me a little along the way. It never works out like that. Music is just music, and that time I waited was wasted.


The asphalt on my feet and my phone hot on my ear asks “why don’t anyone’s relationships ever work?” I wish I had an answer to that question that isn’t one of the same things we’ve said a dozen times. I wish I had the answer she wants to hear. On the other side of town and the other side of my conversation, blue eyes fill with tears and Willie Nelson sings along.


Later, Hamilton Leithauser sings a Leonard Cohen song I’d forgotten. It goes “We swore to each other that our love would surely last. You kept right on loving me and I went on a fast. Now I am too thin, your love is too vast.” At least Hamilton and Leonard know what they have done. The weight of it all shows up in their eyes. Look for it.


“Why does it matter so much?”, someone asks or wants to. Someone who can fill up all the empty space inside of them by themselves, with words and pictures and songs and video games and ice cream. We reply or want to: it matters because we are vessels and we are water. We want to drink, and we want to be drunk. We are parched, and we are flooding. We have love that will replace the blood in our veins and stop our heartbeat if we can’t breathe it into someone’s mouth soon.


“Elliott says that most men just can’t be as committed as the women in relationships and that’s why it doesn’t work.” Thanks, Elliott. We all figured that out when our dad’s were gone on business for our entire lives, and the first time our first loves looked past our eyes when we were speaking and fixed on a foreign body, and we figured it out when we got left & left & left & left.


We wish we could love the rare exceptions, but it never works out that way because the world is too mean. The truth is that they’re out there. Way past the love we examine every day and all of the endings that make us wring our hands and tearducts, there’s a small army of boys who want us. They aren’t the ones we chose. When they’re asleep, we don’t stay awake staring and imagining ways for them to wake up to the world they want to live in. They’re just asleep, and soon enough we are too. When we kiss them because of whiskey, our bodies don’t change and the world doesn’t spin. When we try to explain, we’re sad -- but only because it reminds us of you (and you and you), and your explanations or lack-of.


We speak of silver linings. “Once you’ve had your heart broken once – really broken – no one can ever hurt you like that again.” But then you walk around in my brain for awhile and it all the knobs I’d switched to off get turned on again and suddenly we’re back where we started. It’s like you’re born over and over again every day, week, or year. You’re less beautiful each time around but my chest tightens it’s grip around my heart just the same and I’m too tired to notice anymore All I can do is love you, love you, love you, over and over, like a rat towards an electric current. Loving him is loving you five years ago. Loving you is loving you five years ago. Waking up is loving you five years ago.


They’re all the same. They’re not as special as we think they are, but writing that down feels like a lie and it won’t ever feel true. They could all be better than they are and they never will be. They will all miss us someday and be unable to figure out that they don’t have to. They won’t love anyone any more than they loved us, but that’s meaningless because they’re broken and the love they have to give is weak and pitiful.


When they are bored or lonely enough someday, they will take a pale photocopy of what they had with us to the altar. We ask them to call us up and let us have that chance, but the world doesn’t work that way and all we get in response is a distant stare -- someone we love’s eyes fixed on a wall that represents the future they don’t want us in because it’s all become too difficult and love isn’t supposed to be difficult. Except that it is.


It’s all arbitrary and meaningless. We find each other and we talk about it until our throats hurt, we talk to boys we pretend could replace you, we talk about those boys and encourage each other to pretend, and then we go home alone where we find you in a song or a computer screen or a memory. We lay down with it and we hold on. Sometimes we send words into space and hope that you’ll read them and hold on to them and maybe we’ll feel it somehow. Really we’re just vibrating on your bedside table, quivering and shaking like the night you left us, and you’re ignoring it, wincing, looking and looking away, dreaming of something bright and new.


“You deserve better,” says every boy who ever walked away.

“If I deserve better, why can’t I have you?”
“…”


The sun started coming out just as I was finishing this. The cheesy faux-significance of that is breaking my heart.