Some time ago, I tweeted, “I really need to find a way to sort out which of the voices in my head I should be listening to, and which I should ignore.” Lest anyone imagine I was joking, I present the following, composed, yes, entirely on my blackberry this morning (with a few edits/link and file insertions) – or, shall I say, afternoon – after long, fitful dreams into which I could not, finally, collapse until well past dawn (the insomnia thing is killing me lately), because it was too important then, for me to wait for my computer to fire up. (Which is happening a lot lately. I swear I’m doing 80% of my writing entirely on my phone, and when I choose to share it, posting directly from there to my Medium Sized Blog – relative to the bloated largess of this one – on Tumblr.)
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Image: Tears spilled listening to Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers & reading email, taken with the crap phone I had back in June.
Pertains to a different album by The National than is referenced here, but image is still apt.
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Some notes on waking, early one Saturday afternoon
Why go to your shrink, when you have the song that’s been stuck in your head for going on 72 hours, which, even though you love the voice of the man who sings it, is getting excessive, so finally you Google the lyrics and then freeze, with a certain horror of recognition, on reading this (on your blackberry, while you are still on the potty)?: If I were a spy in the world inside your head/ Would I be your wife in the better life you led?1
For context: In 1990, when I was first with my future husband (whom I’d first met when we were ages 3 and 4, respectively, and again in 1984, when I was 13), we had a romantic date at this Mongolian and Japanese restaurant in a strip mall, anchored by a K-Mart2.
When we got our fortune cookies, his said “Friends long absent will be returning to you.” (Through the seven years following – through each of our insane girlfriends, which in my case included decidedly non-awesome confrontations with the law – he kept it in his wallet, along with a picture of me he’d taken of me, in the yard of my now-estranged aunt.)
We laughed then, on reading his fortune, because that was how it had always been with us: rotating in and out of each others’ orbits.
Then I opened mine, which read, “You and your wife will be happy in your lives together.” We laughed at that too, because I was entirely out then as “bisexual, erring on the side of women.”
Coming back to him, seven years later, was, among other things, an admission that my fortune had been very, very wrong.
It took awhile for us to figure out that perhaps our fortunes hadn’t been so much “wrong” as “switched.”
Even so, I’ve had moments of ambivalence, in which my brain takes leave of my body, aimlessly wandering its “less traveled” roads. (Or, perhaps more accurately: “roads traveled extensively, but finally abandoned out of dire necessity.”)
And that’s when I need to get back into my own head, cutting through the static of last night’s drinks and dreams, to figure out what that persistent melody is trying to tell me, so I can pull myself back from the detour, and remember “this is the person I married, for all kinds of good reasons stretching far beyond the necessity of abandoning those other failed, landmine-infested roads, and I truly love him.”
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1 The song is Bitters & Absolut, by The National (from their eponymous record). You can hear it and read the lyrics here here, and/or buy the mp3 from Amazon. No, there’s no affiliate link giving me any kickback from purchases (not that I couldn’t use kickbacks! See pathetic note in column at right, unless you’re reading via RSS!), because I’m too lazy to figure that shit out.
2 Said mall having been built over the literal rubble of one of my numerous, vaguely remembered childhood homes. Only clear memory from that address, on or near Williamsburg, Virginia’s Waller Mill road: when the stepfather I had for a brief period stepped on a nail in the yard, which may or may not have gone all the way through his foot, but there were weird and, considering his artistic rages and otherwise erratic behavior, nonsensical and scrambled allusions to Jesus that, still, I somehow associate with that moment. (And a further tangent: Since the restaurant still exists, we celebrated our 6th wedding anniversary there, in 2007.)
