But you make such a beautiful wreck, you do
I have always been waiting for one of two things to happen. Either I would grow old enough that all of my insecurities and fears would fall away, become a teenager's irrelevant nonsense... or I would grow to be everything I have always wanted to be, and would therefore never need to measure myself against anyone else again.
I guess I've been waiting to get married, waiting to have a kid, waiting to tie myself down in all the ways that people do, until one of those things happens. I don't mean to say that I don't have good days. Just that... even on good days, I never extend so far as to suppose that I have approached those milestones.
There's a tavern on the corner called the "Milky Way"
And you look so at home there, it makes me afraid.
My mother defines success differently. That's to be expected - every soul on this earth defines success differently. But I believe most young people do measure themselves against their parents - not simply against their parents' expectations, but also against their own perception of their parents as people, what parts of that model they wish to emulate and what parts they wish to avoid. They are the only structures that stand for us, at the beginning of our lives - they are the only features on the horizon. One can either aim for them, or assiduously avoid them, but there is no course of action one can choose that does not take them into account.
It's also true that there is no one in the world who has the power to make us feel like children like our parents. I have to assume that'll remain true until I'm dead. It's something of a quantum oddity, perhaps: we can move any distance from our starting point, and yet the promontory edifice that represents them will always be on the horizon, never getting any closer and never disappearing from view. We are always as far away as we will ever be, and as close as it is possible to get, to the first examples of humanity we are ever given to become.
I don't mean to sound fatalistic. I suppose I've simply spent a lot of years coming to terms with the fact that I will never reach that point on the horizon - I will never be my mother, whether I wanted to or not - but more than that, I will never be whatever it is she wanted me to be.
At the dark end of this bar
What a beautiful wreck you are
I may never go to school for anything at all. I may live out my life doing the littlest it takes to make ends meet, while I devote my energies to attending to the things that truly matter to me: to the family I've built, to the work I care about, to the joys that matter so much more than the numb, grey scaffolding of finances and compromises that prop them up. I don't care about having a career. I don't want to buy a house. I don't want to nail myself to the ground with a mortgage and good credit and neighbors I can count on and a job that offers dental. I think it's possible to live comfortably without those things. I think it's possible to be happy without those things. I am, and I have been, and I will be.
When you go too far
What a beautiful wreck you are.
If we're sticking with this horizon metaphor - and perhaps it's my early childhood talking, but a horizon to me is always a Kansas horizon, a perfect circle of windswept cereal crops, unbroken from where I stand to where I can't see any more except by the occasional water tower. So let's call my mom a water tower on the horizon there, one I know I'll never reach. I've tortured myself for years, trying to walk to where that is, trying to read the town's name on its side. I can't. And moreover, I can't do that to myself any longer.
But it's not the only watertower on the horizon. It's not the only thing I measure myself against. In fact, if you want the truth, this Kansas skyline of mine fair bristles with monuments, so many that there must be a fucking city everywhere but where I am, just out of sight.
I try to quote songs here that I like, and that match my current mood. I'm running into difficulties lately because the songs don't change - the particulars of my mood might vary, but the broad strokes stay, and the songs that seem to best exemplify those broad strokes haven't changed much over the past few months. I don't wish to bore you with the same songs over and over. Then again, I suppose you could save yourself time, skip everything I've ever written here, and listen to "I'm Not That Girl" from Wicked instead. That would about cover it.
All the plans you had from seven years ago
Like all the promises you made, I watched them come and go
"That Girl" has been a number of different girls, at different times in my life. As something of a perpetual sidekick, the perennial also-ran, I do have a tendency to accumulate strong, sympathetic, dynamic heroines for whom I provide a harsh, rough-edged, unpolished foil. I'm good at throwing impressive women into sharp relief. I'm not so very good at seeing myself, I suppose. I have to assume that, because to not do so would be the most atrocious kind of blind ingratitude. I have been incredibly fortunate - have had love that most people never experience in their lifetime, not once, but several times. Have seen time stop around me at the sight of a beloved person, have seen the laws of the world bend and break before it. If I had died at sixteen, having experienced only what I had known to that point, I would have been luckier than most. At twenty - luckier still. Now - luckier than all but a handful in the universe, human or alien, I feel sure. So to suppose that I am as deficient as I seem to myself is to suppose that all this luck is misplaced or accidental, and I won't insult the intelligence and capabilities of my loved ones that way. I have to assume that part of my deficiency, perhaps the part that cripples me the most, is an inability to see myself clearly, to see in myself what others see.
This leaves me measuring myself against everyone, everyone I encounter. The more important they are, the more vital they become to me or my family, the more I sink in my own sight relative to their height. I thought this would end at some point. I thought that I would grow out of this kind of helpless, juvenile need to be special, to be different, to be someone's goddamn princess in a fucking tower. I'm the one constantly espousing how it's impossible to be everything to anyone, how every person on this earth needs more than any one person can give them, and that it shouldn't be any other way.
You put your keys in the car, but it wouldn't drive
Your hands on the wheel, lookin' barely alive.
It feels like a double standard. Perhaps it even reads like one. I tell people openly that I mean to marry Brendon, that he is my first priority - this never changes. And yet, I can also tell them, in our private moments together, that I belong to them utterly. In that moment, I do. In that moment, I mean it. I don't feel this as a lie; it does not seem disingenuous to me. I feel the truth of it - in the arms of someone I love, I see nothing else. In the arms of two people I love, my world consists of those two, and all else could perish in flames for all I know or care. Is this difficult for others? Is this impossible? Is this a logical contradiction?
I suppose I want... I want someone to be as obsessed with me as I am with everyone I love. To spend the ludicrous amounts of time I spent agonizing about what they mean, what they want, what I can do to make them happy. To bask the way I do in everything they say, everything they do, everything they write and draw and make. To wait as breathlessly, as needily, as greedily, as I do for every word, every smile, every moment they grant me. I want someone else to suffer when I'm away, to sometimes be as foolish and insecure as I am, to need me as helplessly, stupidly, childishly as I need them. Maybe that's not something men do. Or maybe they do, and they hide it. I don't know.
Maybe it's the grand gesture I'm missing, the helpless romantic. The over-the-top, unnecessary act. The surprise, the unprovoked, uninhibited outpouring of devotion, the impractical promise, the impossible vow. It's happened a time or two, I think. Mostly - here's what's funny. Do you know who's most given to that kind of useless, ill-advised, unrestrained adoration? Brock. For all he loves to drive me crazy - for all he promises and then fails, for all he demands and then can't return, for all the times he's gone out of his way to damage me and everything I care for - more than anyone else I know, he has always been the one who regularly surprised the hell out of me with a sudden, unsolicited paean to what he feels for me. Maybe that's why I put up with all the rest of it.
God, what on earth is wrong with me. I spent years upon years struggling with immature men. Wishing for someone I didn't have to teach how to function, how to be a human being. I have men like that now, more than one. My boys have grown into men. I guess that means that in all that time, I never grew out of being a girl. I wonder if I ever will.
Labels: Aidan, Brendon, Brock, Introspection, Love
posted by Rivaine # 12:12 AM 
