Of Broken Things

Beware
the pull.

The strange beauty
of broken things.

The fracture
unthinking
breeds treachery.

The sirens
don't sing
to your health. 

The Shard

It may have happened before.
And maybe it'll happen again.
But every time, like a serial somnambulist shocked to wake up and find yourself teetering on a high-wire, you wonder how the fuck you let it happen. Again.

You let someone get under your skin. Not just that - you went ahead and built them a fucking serviced apartment under there.
And you did it without checking to see if they had further travel plans.
And they moved right in. Stayed; used the facilities.
Why not? There was a heated pool and room service. No need to pick up after themselves.

And then it happened. You woke up on that fucking high wire.

I break it off.
You break it off.
He/she breaks it off.
We break it off.
It doesn't matter.
Point is - it breaks off.

And everything you thought they were/ we were/ it was - is gone.
Your pleasure palace burned to a cinder, razed to the ground.
All That Was/Might Have Been is reduced to rubble - to a hard jagged shard left inside you like a molten splinter to gouge with vicious glee at the soft unguarded heart of you.

In the thick of the aftermath, every breath is blood.
But, the thing is, you've been to this circus before.
And so, you know that fortunately, at some point, the bleeding will stop.
And not so fortunately, all you can do till then is wait.
Wait till breathing is only merely excruciating...and then only painful.
Wait for the wounds to scab over. Wait for the scar tissue to come in. Wait for it all to eventually be just one more unevenly mended rent on the fabric of your existence.

And the irony is that it won't be the pain you'll resent.
It'll be the time - the time it'll take for that scar tissue to form; the time it'll take till you're you again.
When you aren't busy being utterly devastated, you'll find yourself mostly being really annoyed by that inconvenient little nugget of reality.

Because that shard is a voracious, persistent, many pointed little bitch and it won't let go of you easy.

A few weeks in, its bite will have dulled to the degree that you'll stop being constantly braced for impact. You'll manage to go about your day to day business doing a credible enough impression of a functional human adult.
But then, when you least expect it, someone somewhere will drop a word into the conversation - a word as random as Dremel, or as mundane as July. Or you'll see something as banal as AstroTurf, or as ubiquitous as sunlight. And suddenly that little bitch will shift and stick you with renewed vehemence.

Over time, though, that scar tissue will come in right and thick. The Shard will settle in and become a numbness within that remains largely inert. At the most sometimes, in maudlin moments, it might cause you a dull twinge - if you're the sentimental kind.

In time you'll forget it's there.
You'll forget that the numbness hosts a living wound.

And then someday in the future, you'll open your eyes and come to the sick realization that once more somehow, despite all your efforts to the contrary, you've landed on the same fucking high wire you swore you'd never so much as go near, let alone attempt to traverse.

And as the newly implanted remnant is in the process of ripping you a new one, as though that itself weren't punishment enough, every old forgotten shard inside of you will come screaming to life, as sharp and vociferous as the day it was born.

Gleefully, in unison, this syndicate will turn full circles under your skin to make sure to jab you with their pointiest sides. And as the voices in your head start up on their symphony of recriminations, mocking you mercilessly for the dumb fucking impulse that led you to make the same fucking mistake all over again, The Shards will join in to offer a command performance of their greatest hits - 'I Told You So', 'You Should Have Known Better.' & 'How Did You Not See This Coming?' 

Get your fucking splinter out of me.

You left your splinter in me.

I gave you lunch and moral support.
Held your hand when the pain wracked through.
You said it was like barbed wire
scraping your insides raw.
I assumed it was the cancer.
Now I wonder it wasn’t the cocaine shakes.

 Fat lot l know about either.

You took a nap and you took your chance.
The Shins and your mouth.
Wincing the Night Away
and the late afternoon sunlight
streaming in from the sea.

And you left your splinter in me.

Right in the middle by my breast bone.
I guess I'm lucky you weren't aiming for the heart.

I made you coffee after.

Gave you leftovers to feed your body
And books for your soul.
I’d have given you anything.
Easing your emptiness,
that became my Holy Crusade.
Thank God, you'll never know.

And then, a couple of weeks or so later,
when you took me out like trash,
How come you got to keep all I gave you?

And all I got was this splinter.
This phantom shard in the center of my chest.

It’s real for all it’s invisible.
Too insipid to be called painful
too persistent to just ignore.

That's the size of the damage you got done.

Get your fucking splinter out of me.

I'm Easy Like Sunday Morning

A memory. 3 years past. Sunday Morning. I'm sitting looking out my window like I like to do. There's plenty to look at but not much to see. Mostly just trees, birds and other tree dwelling wildlife. Then there's the apartment building across, just far enough away to afford privacy but near enough to provide innoccuous voyeuristic distraction - Like a tv set with no more than 2-3 channels all showing simultaneously on different screens. Scenes of staid domesticity on a daily basis. Mostly just static.

I mostly watch the couple on the first floor. They're my favourite show. Both probably in their 30s, they seem successful enough without being flash, attractive enough without being glamorous, cool enough without being hip. The average DINK couple, I suppose. As it turns out this morning's episode is called 'Cleaning Day.' This should be fun.

She's in shorts and Tshirt, thin and determined. He's big and ill at ease. Reluctant to say the least. This is obvioulsy not his idea of the ideal Sunday morning. She looks grim and faintly possessed as she contemplates strategy and starts the assault on whatever grime and grease may have accumulated in her kitchen.

He's in a state of suspended animation. You can tell he's lost; like he'd like to help but he cant read the instruction manual - it's in female. Clearly out of his league, he stands hovering motionlessly just inside the kitchen door. You can tell he's going for one of two possible outcomes with this tactical maneuver.

Scenario #1. - Delusional: He's hoping his mere presence in the kitchen at the time of cleaning will satisfactorily count in her mind as an actual contribution to the work. The theory is that this would leave her happy and unshrill while giving him that warm and fuzzy feeling of being useful without actually having had to do anything unpleasant. (Highly unlikely, but hope is that thing with feathers...)

Scenario #2. - Practical: Failing ideal scenario #1. he's hoping that being a huge, lumbering hunk of stupid will infuriate her enough that she'll refuse his help and throw him out of the kitchen. In which case he can safely and guiltlessly go back to whatever it is he'd have liked to have been doing in the first place.

He understands that while this scenario precludes the advantages of 'happy & unshrill' and 'warm & fuzzy' it still manages to circumvent the 'death & destruction' that might result from the implementation of Scenario #3. (Scenario #3. - Unthinkable - In this fictitious scenario, he simply refuses to help with the kitchen and instead prepares himself for full scale nuclear attack and subsequent annihilation.)

Meanwhile, she's been venting her frustrations on the kitchen windowsill looking demented and vaguely pissy, like she's wondering where she can go to get a refund on the strong, sensitive, gallant and ridiculously house-broken hunk of man Mills & Boon promised her. So she scrubs away, ferocious, twitching like an angry epileptic and he skulks around guiltily in the background, twitching like a rabbit in heroin withdrawal. They look like secret adversaries.

But then it changes. Her shoulders relax. She capitulates. She turns around and gives him simple instruction. He follows. He looks vaguely relieved. That wasn't so difficult. She directs him again. He follows, soon looking almost eager. He starts small - lift this, reach for that. Gradually he gets more involved - adding suggestions, taking initiative, solving problems and by and by I see them come together; coalesce into a team and attack that kitchen with joint vengeance.

Before long, there's horse play and soon they're both smiling and then laughing and then having plain ol' fun. In between cleaning and having water fights and dust-rag duels they grin at each other, looking a little bemused that they're having such a good time cleaning a kitchen; pleasantly surprised that together they've just managed to turn a dull annoying chore into quality family time.

And I'm sitting there in my window watching shamelessly and thinking - This is nice. This is what makes being in relationships worth it, I guess - the fact that even unpleasant jobs can be turned on their heads and made sufferable and even enjoyable because they were shared by two people who exercised their caring for one another. How nice.

With a warm, fuzzy, wistful feeling I realize - this is a phone company commercial. (You know the ones - so treacherously manipulative that you find yourself saddled with a family & friends talk-plan that you won't use all because what you really wanted to have was the family and friends featured in the commercial.) Only this is not a commercial. This is in the flesh. Real.

And predictably, almost on cue, I'm about to tailspin into a maudlin and prolonged spasm of dejected singlegirlhood when I realize something.
If they were looking out their window at me, they'd see a single girl with no responsibility more pressing than lounging by an open window, listening to Nina Simone while drinking coffee and looking out at the world...I'm probably their gourmet Brazilian coffee commercial.

Plugged in. Tuned out.

I got talking to a friend recently, about music and what it's meant to us, individually.

As we talked I realized I've been plugged in since I was maybe 9-10. That's a little more than 20 years. Aside from family, that would qualify as the longest relationship I've ever had. The Walkman to the Discman to the Ipod; more than half my life plugged on earphones.

It's different when you're listening to music over speakers and the world around you hears what you hear. It's a whole other thing when the music inside your head is yours alone. It becomes the voice in your head, your best friend, your therapist, your muse, your drug, your tourniquet, your happy pill and your bleeding heart.

You constantly have a soundtrack to your reality. Or maybe it's the subtitles. Every experience gets filtered and processed through the vocabulary of your playlist. It becomes a time capsule for your emotional development. If social archaeologists were to excavate my psyche, they'd find my musical influences stratified, compressed like minerals in the folds of my brain.

Listen to this - "The expression you wear on your face to keep the world out becomes the shape of the person you are." I read that somewhere. I wonder if that's true of the music you listen to as well? The music is my force-field - It keeps me in, it keeps you out. But I can't tell if I listen to what I do because it fits the grooves in my brain or I wonder, did the music engineer those grooves and orchestrate the person I've become? No answer. No matter.

What matters is that it has been with you, everywhere. On mountaintops with the wind slapping high-fives against your open palms; in the rush-hour hell of seething cars; holding your hand on a lonely night walk, watching blue lights winking at the dark; in the slow baked sunshine of a construction set, tuning out the sweat and paint and assholes; on overnight flights and bus-rides, flickering in that hazy, surreal half-life between awakenings and sleep. It has been there.

Music has been the one constant. The one solid thing. People come, go, change, wilt, take, give, drift away, move on, fuck off and fade out, but the music is always there. Always the same. Your time machine, your escape hatch, your weapon, your warm embrace, your festering gall.