“I’m biting my tongue and I’m holding my breath.
I’m counting the minutes as they tick towards death.
I’m on the verge of crying, but I don’t shed a tear.
This music reminds me that it’s you that’s not here.”
The way my room is set up right now, the distant, blank walls and half-finished paintings, the strange emptiness in the middle of the room that seems to ask for something to fill it without suggesting anything but awkwardness, the tiny bed in the far corner facing just so… If I let it, this room reminds me of the last bedroom I slept in before I moved out of my parents’ home. This room reminds me of the bedroom I cam home to after spending a week with my betrothed. It seems foreign; the other room, the one I am reminded of, was literally built and painted and my stuff put in it while I was out of town. I left the safety of my family and my home and my own room to venture out into the world and seek true love (I didn’t find it that week, only disappointment and the realization that I was not mature enough to handle an important relationship properly.) and when I returned averything was different. I was different because I had just learned of some of the many ways that what was wrong was about me and not about the other or the world. My family was different because they were beginning to see me as someone who would not always be around. The most visible change though, was my bedroom, which had been completely transformed. When I had left, my room was a mess, my possessions in haphazard, random piles all over the floor, one wall half gone in the beginnings of the construction that was going to take place, and the remaining walls full of the color and shape of my first murals. When I returned the entire shape of the room had changed; it was so much larger than it had been that the middle of it had become a strange emptiness that had nothing to fill it. All of my possessions had been put together on shelves or in drawers along the walls, and my tiny bed crouched in the far corner, facing just so. It felt foreign; this was not the room that I had left, and it never could be again.
The room I am in now has the same feel to it. When I lay in my bed at night, if it is quiet or I have music on that was the music that I was listening to so much in those days, I can feel the shape of that old room reaching out to me through the dark, the outline of the immobile fan on the ceiling, the same old lamp in the corner, and I am reminded of how I felt then. I am reminded of the girl I had visited, had been engaged to once upon a time. By this time we had been “just friends” for quite a while, but she was still (is still) so much to me. I had left one new place and come home to another and I had a phone number that I called to let her know that I had arrived safely. I tried to call again a week later, and the number had been disconnected. I have not been able to contact her since that day. It is hard for me to believe that this love of my life, who had been so far away and out of sight for so much of the time that I knew her, that the last time that I ever even spoke to her was a day that I hugged her goodbye. This song, this room, this night reminds me of her.
“There are days and there are nights and there are goodbyes,
but the ones you remember are always goodbyes.
We all have life and we all have dreams and we all are allowed to share,
but it seems we hide what we hold inside from anyone that might care.”
“If I had that week again to live, I’d do it all diff’rently,
And not the week that I spent with her, but the week I didn’t call;
I’d call her up and and I’d keep in touch and I’d never let her go,
For because I didn’t care enough, it seems like I’ve lost it all.
I’ve had relationships since then, and I’m a successful guy,
I do the things I want to do and I live a normal life.
Yet something in my heart can’t seem to figure out what to do
And every day I’m torn apart by this melancholy blue.”
Forgive the poor verses, but with this nostaligc music playing and my mind and heart racing and me being drowned in emotions that want to squeeze words out of me but are fighting over what those words should be, I am unwilling or unable to censor even the worst of lines. I have been keeping so much that I have written in my mind off the page and out of my computer lately. I have written so many pages in the last few days, yet I hope that none of it gets read by the originally intended recipient. I have been trying desperately to write a letter to a girl, and every time I do it comes out one way or another that I am not sure is the right thing to express. I want so much to communicate something to her, but a stronger force within me is the confusion over what exactly I should be communicating. Or why. Or when. Or how. Someone commented to me recently that she is the only thing that they have ever seen truly confuse me. I could not disagree outright.
There is so much on my mind and in my heart lately. I am sure that these things are part of the reason that I am thinking of lost loves. I am currently confronted with the situation of having just realized that everything that I was working towards in a relationship has been called into question and I didn’t have an adequate answer. I know and I knew that whether I had an answer everything could have worked out great and that not having answers is no reason to stop living. Yet the question begs an answer, and I see two sides to that; the relationship cannot go forward without an answer, and an adequate answer cannot be found. So, the relationship is lost because someone brought the mind in to do faith’s job, and I have seen this happen before. I can let it go. I had to let studying Philosophy go too, and we’re doing okay without a serious relationship together. I can let this go.
I feel like it’s too late to let go of the girl I lost before, though. She disappeared before I could let her go, so I’m still holding on. To emptiness and loss. To the idea of an empty room that lends to my lonliness by reminding me what I’ve left.
The room I came home to that day, the last day I ever saw her, no longer exists by the way. I moved out of there about a month later and they immediately converted it into a whole other thing. It only exists in my memory of it and the way I see it in the room I’m about to go to sleep in. Sometimes I think that the girls I’ve lost are the same way; they don’t really exist anymore, even though there’s something filling the space where they used to be, in my heart and in the world.
