girl, your voice breaks my heart...

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the desperation is overwhelming.  i know it inside and out.  how many years?  even as a young girl?  how many silly evenings did i spend wishing on the first star for a way out?  and now, with no parents to run from, i still identify with this eagerness.  i spent too many years inside such hunger.

but now i live in a city. i know how to wait tables. there's nothing to run from these days.  i can write poems in the evenings and dream in my lonely hours of hands in my hair, a man that might understand me or, at least, a song like this.  i can read whatever terrible philosophy finds me.  i can curl up beneath a blanket i made with my own two hands.  just me and my crochet hook and a bit of yarn, just like my mama, just like my daddy.  where the fuck did those two go?  oh yeah, one died and the other decided it wasn't worth the trouble.  life.  and so i listen to this song and ache.  people i haven't seen in a decade leave messages on my phone and my eyes sting with tears.  but that was a different life.  i'm not that little girl anymore.  i'm not a little girl at all.  i'm 32 years old.  i'm grown.  i've been thrown against the wall and come face to face with some shit that was way before its' due.  and i'm not mad about it, just please attempt some understanding...  i can't be younger than i am.  i can't be 32 in certain ways.  in certain ways, i'm so much older than that.  how old were you when your mother died?   did you have a stable job?  did you have a spouse?  did you lose a spouse? did you have children?  were they grown?  were they in college?  see, when i was in college i was taking care of my dad.  he's a quadriplegic.  i would go to class and then race home to cook dinner, do the laundry and be a confidant.  on the weekends, sometimes, i'd paint pictures that were sold in a gallery in san francisco.  people only saw the paintings.  they didn't see what went on behind them.  i wasn't a good enough artist at that point.  i didn't know how to make it apparent.  i didn't want to.  i've spent alot of years feeling very alone and very ashamed.

but not anymore.  and no matter.  it's just that i love this song.  and while it plays i crave the same shit she sings of...  that goddamn ache, that reprieve.  just put your hands in my hair, kiss me hard and make me feel like none of this matters, that i am somewhere else...


....


at intervals, i feel like one big gaping wound....  

or one big block of ice. 

does it matter which?  i still need your mouth.  i still need your hands.  i am still a human being, equipped with all the tawdry longings and secrets that most possess, and i still want a strong arm around my shoulder.


i play the old tunes that our parents put on the stereo when we were children.  my heart aches something awful.  not for what might have been but for what is.  and in spite of how i feel tonight, i love us kids with such ferocity.  they don't see it but we have been made so much more beautiful because of what we've come through, dear brother and sister.  the task is for us to see it.  and then, to believe it. 

;)


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