Never Easy

Today, I picked up Lee Brice's album, Hard 2 Love.  Will report when I've had a chance to listen to it the requisite twelve times.  (I am also at 0.11 GB left on my iPod.  Holy smokes.)

Also today, I stumbled upon something truly relevant to this blog: the very first song I've ever written.  And I can tell you that for certain.  It's a few years (two, maybe?) older even than "Zach," so you can trust me on this.  I was in the middle of organising everything I have ever placed in my room - doesn't everyone when on 'vacation'? - and I had finally gotten to the filing cabinet in my closet.  Oh, yes.  I have a filing cabinet in my closet.  That was what I wanted more than anything for my thirteenth or fourteenth birthday, and I still remember the joy of going to Staples to pick it out.  But anyway, enough about my bizarre idiosyncrasies.  I was going through everything in there, because I really didn't need most of the stuff I had filed in my blithesome adolescence.  Among other things, I had separate files each for "Cycling," "Giro d'Italia," "Tour de France," and "Vuelta a Espana," in addition, of course, to my multiple binders about the Tour.  I also had a separate file for every single awards ceremony under the sun, which was actually kind of fun.  I'm such a girl.  But anyway - I will not fall into the trap of self-importance under which I wrote the previous (deleted) post.  I will return to the point.  The largest file was a bulging one labelled, "Miscellaneous," and in there, I found all sorts of stuff.  But smack-dab in the middle were two pages torn out of a notebook and covered in colourful ink and disastrously large and terrible cursive, and I immediately knew what that was about.  You see, I'd always written creatively outside of the structure of a classroom. It was my thing.  Like Matilda, only much more ordinary, and way less heroic.  But that year, 2004/2005, was the time when I first began to be more ambitious with my work.  That was the year when I disliked my teachers, all but one, and so I decided to stave off my boredom in class (because when I didn't like my teachers, or the way they taught the subject, I tended to think I didn't need to pay attention) by branching out.  That was the year I began writing an ill-fated play/screenplay about an indentured servant falling in love with her employer.  In the same notebook, when I had abandoned that attempt (and left my poor heroine, Julia, walking the streets of Philadelphia in exhaustion), and between pages upon pages with lists of songs I had heard on the radio and wanted to have, I set down this very first song of mine.

I remember extremely well the circumstances and the subject of this...interesting...work.  They have nearly everything to do my imagined life and very little to do with actual reality.  It was the year I was "in love" with Mike R, the guy who sat behind me in Social Studies - the only class in which I actually liked, nay adored, my teacher - and "stole" the answers to my homework (I never really made it difficult for him) and had me make his sewing project in Home Ec.  Oh, yes...  But it was also the year I discovered that I could be doing anything inside my mind, as long as I looked normal on the outside, because no one would be able to tell what lives I was living within my mind (a useful discovery: it has served me well in the ensuing years), and put it to great use.  Every time Mike spoke to me during class and thus got me in trouble - but oh, how beautiful he was and how kind when telling me to blame it all on him because he could deal with it but holy mackerel how gorgeous he was is he just getting better-looking for the memory or was he always that way? - my mind would curl up and get away.  I'm probably coming across as nuts right now.  But it's 1:14 in the morning, and I have no desire to hide.  I may delete this, or at least edit it, tomorrow.  Right now, though, I'm just trying to explain that my mind has lived stories I've personally never experienced, and that is what birthed this song. (Side note: this sort of translation of imagined experience into song is not unusual for me; it's how all of the most beautiful of my love songs - and of course, the "beautiful" is surrounded by an air of misguided conceit - came about. Even if I never have something like love in my real life and have to turn to artificial insemination or whatever, I will at least have lived the Greatest Love Story Ever in my head.)


It's really more like a poem, really, considering it doesn't rhyme.  Except in a few random places that I suspect were just accidental.  I've transcribed it in the way it's set down on the pages I'd ripped out of that notebook; the line breaks could be just because my tentative and rather large cursive (now, condensed to a sweeping, minuscule elegance of which I am beyond proud) accommodated them so, or because that was the intent.  Not sure on that one.  And one last note: the verses were originally set down in a different order, but then there were numerals written into the margins labelling them differently, so that's the order in which I wrote it down for you.  Interesting, though, that the verses could be in any old order.  I'm impressed, eighth-grade self.

Never Easy

Sometimes when I think of you
I hear you in a different language
sometimes, when I think of you,
I dream about forever
Sometimes, when I think of you,
I know I must be going crazy, since
you and me, we so obviously cannot be

CHORUS:
it's never easy, I know,
it's never easy
never easy to understand
that your life falls apart in the end
I know that I can never
love you again
it's never easy, I know,
it's never easy

we grew up listening to stories of broken hearts
as children we scorned them
and dared life to try it on us
saying what we would do differently
and taunting the authors for not asking us
so I never expected you to turn on me

why do we always seem to
hurt the ones we love the most?
and dance with those who don't matter?
why do things never happen
the way we plan?
I used to think you held the world in your hands
and all the answers in your heart.

CHORUS:
it's never easy, I know,
it's never easy
never easy to understand
that your life falls apart in the end
I know that I can never
love you again
it's never easy, I know,
it's never easy

I wish I could make you understand
how strange my life is now
without you, everything seems different
but I know how things would be
if I held on
so I let you go
but it killed me to see you leave...

(it's never easy, I know,)
(it's never easy)
(never easy to understand)
(that your life falls apart in the end)
(I know that I can never)
(love you again)
(it's never easy, I know,)
(it's never easy)

There are parts of it that I had forgotten, some parts which make me cringe, but other parts that I love.  You can pick and choose for yourself whether you like or not, but I'm so proud of myself for not having thrown it away.  I've just finished my third song notebook, but I only have two left to me, because in a fit of masochism and self-hatred, I threw away the first notebook I'd ever filled, only stopping long enough to rip out the aforementioned "Zach," so I don't have that progression anymore.  At least I have this, though.  I'm curious to hear what you think, still.

Much love, and thank you for the musik,

Just Another Ordinary Girl

And bad mistakes, I've made a few.  I've had my share of sand kicked in my face...

p.s.  I sure hope y'all are watching the Olympics.  Some really great stories are coming out of London.

p.p.s.  I cannot believe that, after all these years, the memory of Mike's face and his STUN-ning smile is still taking my breath away.  Aren't middle school crushes supposed to go away???

p.p.p.s.  And...I just tried to find Mike on Facebook.  It's getting kind of creepy at this point; I've bumped into several people's profiles, all of whom I had never wanted to see again.  All sorts of unpleasant memories are back.  I'd tell some here, but then I'd feel like an idiot (okay, there's this one prevailing memory coming to mind of when this jock hit me in the head with a volleyball "accidentally" during gym and my ear hurt so much I cried).  Thankfully, I think, I can't find him.  So then I googled myself instead.  I'm much more high-profile than he is, and than I wish I were.

p.p.p.p.s.  I'm heading back to Nashville for a few days at the end of this month.  My friend is moving back there, because the reason she moved away is gone, so we're making a road trip of it.  Should be great.  Also, because she's going to be living there, it'll be easier for me to go now!  We have some other tentative dates planned for me to come visit her: one in October (I'm actually trepidatious about this, because it would happen on the same weekend as the Devils' season/home opener - and this, ladies and gentlemen, is probably why I don't have, and have never had, friends), and one for New Year's.  It's my favourite city in the US, and I myself intend to move there, after I get my Master's.

p.p.p.p.p.s.  Because, I'm going back to school (grad school, this time, joy) for a Music Business degree.  Sure, you say, that's the usual trajectory after a Bachelor's degree in History.  So what if it's not "usual"?  It's me.  This, right here, is me.  I'd like to work for ASCAP - because I am not stupid enough or foolish enough to believe I can make it, talent-wise, in songwriting.  I may have had my eyes on the stars when I was younger, but I'm older now.  My dreams are smaller, if not more reasonable.  I'm content to be ordinary, forgettable.  It's what I have always been, I'd just never realised it before.