Saying Goodbye: A Playlist for the Silence

1. Every Time We Touch (Acoustic) - Cascada
2. Hide and Seek - Imogen Heap
3. Golden - Fall Out Boy
4. Roadside - Rise Against
5. Broken (feat. Amy Lee) - Seether
6. 9 Crimes - Damien Rice
7. Misguided Ghosts - Paramore

Download.

July 7th Vlog - Breaking Up

I'm posting this video before it's done processing, so hopefully it'll work right when it's done. If it doesn't work in the morning, someone should let me know.

EDIT: I re-uploaded. It should work now

Uncomfortable Revelations

I'm sitting in my bedroom under the glow of the Christmas lights that hang from my ceiling. It is one thirty in the morning in the middle of July, but it could be ten-thirty at night at the beginning of January. The lights seem to freeze time. Perhaps that's why I turn them on when I wish time would stop. Or maybe run backwards.

I'm wondering what kind of person I am, what kind of person I truly am. It seems like an odd question to be asking at one-thirty in the morning, but what the hell. I need to ask myself sometime, don't I?

I think the problem is that I already know my answer.

I am, and always have been, a selfish, spiteful, manipulative person. I worm my way into people's hearts, use them, and cast them aside when I feel I've had my fun. I am a living, breathing vampire, nothing more. It reminds me of Marissa, and the irony is not lost on me.

After all, we hate most in others what we see most strongly in ourselves.

When the after-image fades, you can finally smell the sulfur and smoke.

We sit on the grass with our friends, watching the fireworks, and his knowledge of the inner-working of pyrotechnics simultaneously makes me giggle and annoys me. I push away both emotions in favor of enjoying the show. I have always loved fireworks, ever since I was young and we could see them from my parents' bedroom windows.

“They're so fucking beautiful,” I say, and this solicits no more than a vague murmur of agreement. “And,” I persist, thinking as I speak and wishing that it was easier to share things with him. “They're only this beautiful because they are in motion. Because they're so temporary.”

I feel like I've stumbled onto some profound insight on the human condition, yet the boy beside me barely notices, instead content to know the technical names of the various types of light in the sky, and to correct our neighbor's assessment that the ones spraying sparks lower to the ground are duds. They are, my boyfriend informs him, actually called fountains, and they are done on purpose.

I reflect on the argument/discussion we had before walking over here, the one that we've had too many times to count now, and on that sense of something's missing that's been hovering over me for days. Weeks, if you want to cut the bullshit. And I feel like crying, because I am sitting here, beneath some of the most beautiful things ever created by human beings, and all my boyfriend can say is that they're wired electrically, but that every rocket in them was made by someone, and he is pretty close to being certified for that.

Somehow, the entire thing is summed up in the one accidentally-profound thing he tells me that whole evening.

“Someone in the Pyrotechnics Guild was cremated and put into a firework,” he says at one point. “A willow. The ones you call waterfalls.”

This distracts me, and I turn to look at him, eyes wide. “Really?” I ask.

“Really.”

A pause. Then, “I want to do that. When I die, I want to be something beautiful like that.”

And somehow it hurts when he doesn't say a thing in response, even though there really isn't anything to say to something like that.

I think, It feels like there's an hourglass slung around both of our necks, and the sand in it is slowly running out a hole in its long-broken bottle.

I think. If only I could fix this, and then, on the heels of that, I don't want to fix this. We can't fix this.

I'm not sure which is worse: knowing what you have is broken, or knowing you might not care enough to repair it anymore.

To Know a Secret

We're blasting down the quiet weekday road, with the last dregs of summer light still clinging to the sky, at a speed that's probably too high and feels even higher to our rushing veins and beating hearts. A smile paints my face like something bright and unexpected, and I think—not for the first time tonight, either—that this is what I want. All of this is what I should have found so much earlier.

All of the windows and his sunroof are open wide, and Rush's “Tom Sawyer” is blasting from his iPod through the car speakers. It's already been mistakenly identified as a Journey song instead, so that later I will have trouble finding it when I go to look it up, but in this moment it doesn't matter. All that matters is that we are flying down the street with it singing in our ears, and I am smiling and maybe laughing, because who would have thought I would ever be in the back seat of this boy's car, with someone else holding my hand? It's incredibly surreal and a huge indication of just how far I've come. I look over at my boyfriend and—

And I'm struck by the feeling of something's missing. This moment is so beautiful, so purely happy, so alive, and as I look over to share it, I falter. It's not that he doesn't feel it. It's more like it doesn't count for him quite as much. Like there are other things that make him fly, things that summer nights and fast cars can never, ever touch.

My smile doesn't slip, but a small, hard pang of that same feeling—something's missing—settles into the middle of the moment and sticks there until long after he's kissed me goodnight and they're blasting away again.

I don't say a word about it to him later, either.

- - -

We've already sneaked him in and then out of my empty house. The timing was perfect and we've got all of our clothes in order again, but my nerves have gotten impatient, and we've slipped quietly out of the house just in case of a quick return of that shiny white Kia that isn't really all that new anymore. That missing feeling is back in the middle of things again, but I ignore it as we sway idly back and forth on the twice-mended chain-held swings.

“I haven't been down here in forever,” I reflect, gazing idly around from behind sunglasses that feel ever more foreign on my face. I can see the worn-out places underneath the nearby oak tree that we—a gang of five that no longer exists except in memories—made three or four summers ago, simply by sitting too much in the same places. The plain yellow monkey bars nearby, like a square with no bottom, are the site of lots of truth games and deep conversations between me and many, many different friends. I think of this with a muted degree of amazement as the list of names grows longer in the back of my mind.

I once weathered a summer thunderstorm here, a decision that I have never quite been able to bring myself to regret. I once ran through spring-time rain with my sister here, singing his songs and crying, sometimes doing both at the same time.

It seems fitting that my boyfriend tells me the news here. I am not supposed to know. He is not supposed to know, either, and I swear not to tell, but by the end of the night, after he's left us for the cloud of pot smoke in an over-crowded kitchen, I have already broken down and told somebody else. She listens to me cry in the middle of her kitchen while we make tacos for ourselves and for her boyfriend, who is in the next room. She tries her best to help, but I can't quite explain this odd cocktail of emotions that start mixing themselves here, on these twice-mended swings. I am happy and sad and desperately confused, and that is just the beginning.

A friend of mine—more than a friend, really, and I have to admit that, because for better or worse we are family, have always been family—is somewhere he does not want to be for reasons he doesn't think are reason enough. Someone finally did what none of the rest of us could do. He is unhappy, and I have been feeling it for a week or more. Feeling it like I have been unhappy, and like I have been running from demons which, in reality, I have already conquered. But he has not, and so they groan and roar and whisper in the back of my head as they do, at a much louder volume, in his.

My boyfriend keeps talking and I hear more, but I am not allowed to repeat it, because I am not supposed to know. I have already said too much, both to my friend making tacos in the kitchen later tonight, and as I write these words in what is, from my spot on the broken swings, tomorrow afternoon. I have said too much, I always say too much, but I know that it will never truly be enough. It has never been enough, not with all of the word I've written for him, to him, about him. There is always more to say, and maybe that's why I've never been able to give up hope—there is always more to say about him. His story is nowhere near over, and I wait now, on bated breath, to hear more.

- - -

I'm going to a party tonight.

I am going to a party, and for some reason or other, this is the first party that I can say I am going to and feel like I have chosen the right words. I know there will be people upon people upon people that I have never met and never heard of. I know that there will be alcohol; not under the table and in the closet, hidden in a we-will-not-speak-of-this kind of way, but a secret in plain sight, courtesy of a parent with the I'd-rather-have-them-in-the-house philosophy. I know that my friends—many part of my chosen family—will be there, and I know that my boyfriend will be there too. I am excited, and I am sort of nervous, and I am also a little bit scared. Because there is a voice in the back of my head that keeps speaking up at odd moments, the little voice that speaks in the familiar tones of my brother.

I'm sure the voice would have been there without him, but it has stolen his vocal cords, and that makes sense, because right now that voice's litany is relatively short and sweet and almost makes sense. One drink, it says. Just one drink tonight. You've never done it before, and you deserve it now because you're not emotionally fucked, but you're being stronger than anyone expects you to be right now. Just one drink. A reward. For everything you've done for all of them. Just one drink. Just one drink. I let the voice talk, because in all honesty, I can't find it in me to completely disagree. I cannot say with any degree of certainty that I will answer, or that the answer I give will be no.

And I wonder if my friend, my brother, had a voice like this once, saying the very same thing, and if he listened to it begging him, and that is why he fell so far.

Because maybe it all started with just one drink.