i heard the song for the first time today and cried the whole way through my first listen. my first thoughts were that it was so honest, his heart laid bare in song. it was his version of what happened.
i have writing, he uses melodies. we each have our outlet, and we each depended on them to make sense of what we were going through. language is so much more explicit, too. i wonder what it would have been like if i were a dancer, a fashion designer. what does heartbreak look like on a dress?
there are a few words in his song, audio clips from good will hunting. they’re right and appropriate, but they cut like glass. each time that one line is repeated i can feel his pain anew.
i’ve written plenty here about the breakup. over the last nine months i’ve left a trail of words in different places around the internet of what it’s been like to leave the relationship and find some peace and understanding about the whole thing. like the crumbs hansel and gretel dropped on their path through the woods, i think i could read back my blog posts and diary entries of the last few months and find my way all the way back to those raw december weeks when i broke up with him.
i write and tell stories. everything is material for something down the line, even if it’s just fodder for conversation with my girlfriends or something for the margins of my notebooks. even at my worst, when i was writhing on the floor with tear soaked, rock hard tissue balls scattered all around my head, i knew that someday it’d be something i’d use for a story.
but my second thought when i heard the song was: everyone will know, everyone will know now that someone he loved very much broke his heart, crushed him and hurt him. my ego, you know? i guess if i regret anything it’s that in order for me to be true to myself i had to hurt him. if there was some way to live my life honestly without doing that, if i could have protected him from the pain of the breakup, ah, protected both of us from the pain of the breakup, i would have liked to have chosen that route.
i’ve always loved his music. soon he’ll be playing shows again with his new EP and maybe it’ll be part of his set list. he’ll play it live for people, answer questions from curious people about the new set of songs, and it’ll be like another story of mine saved somewhere on the internet. a time in our lives memorialized in notes and words.
Filed under: breaking up, love, writing
Recent Comments