"Don't forget me," I begged.
I remember you said, "Sometimes, it lasts in love.
But sometimes..."
- Adele, Someone Like You
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"You probably read that I am cynical when it comes to love."
"You're just disenchanted. How could you not be after what happened? … The way that you write and how hope just shines out of your writing screams that you still have hope underneath all of whatever happened to you.
I could be wrong."
Please, don't be.
You can be wrong about anything else, everything else, you can be wrong about every single claim about how incredible I am, how selfless I am. Everything else, I can spend my entire life without. Because it doesn't matter whether or not I actually hold claim on extraordinary. I'd still spend every waking day aspiring for extraordinary.
But this...?
This, it breaks my heart to imagine a life without. I have seen the face of hate, I have seen the face of lies, I have seen the face of ignorance. I know what it is like to feel dispensable. I know what it is like to devalue love, and to depreciate affection. I acquired bitterness, but I'm tired of the taste. I want to put down my sword and shield, but they're bound to me by chains. And the very thought of hate winning the war, of hate winning in the face of love...
So please, just don't be wrong about this.
-+-
Music is the greatest measure of my life.
I look back on the last seven months, and I don't only see events and milestones. Every smile, every tear, every laugh, every face, and every leap of faith is accompanied by harmony. Every memory is riddled with quarter notes and accidentals.
For me, listening to an evoking song is the same as staring down the miniscus of a graduated cylinder.
I used to always measure the quality of my relationship with Phuc by my emotional reaction to John Mayer's "Slow Dancing In A Burning Room." As the tune ran across the words, "You were the one I tried to draw," I would always be consumed by tears -- I knew that I was losing my muse. When the lyrics cried, "I'll make the most of all the sadness; you'll be a bitch because you can," I felt a dagger in my chest. It rung with me as a reflection of my shortcomings, and made it so much easier to blame everything on myself.
It was also how I fell upon the initial epiphany that I was beginning to move on from The Break. I was driving through Merced, with the air still heavy of summer heat, when Adele's "Someone Like You" started playing on the radio. And the lyrics evoked… joy. I was overwhelmed. I gasped, under my breath, "…Oh my god, I'm getting better." I rolled down the windows of my car in celebration, and spent the rest of the drive with my hair being tousled by the warm winds. I felt so free. It felt so new to breathe.
It soon became second nature to distinguish between the stages of my life by song. Early on, I sustained on songs that specifically revolved around recovery from heartbreak. But at some point, I stopped skipping every love song on my iTunes in rage and exasperation, and they eventually fell back into the identities that they had before I met Phuc: run-of-the-mill catchy melodies. Yet, as I saw the repercussions of kindness and my disillusions increased, love songs became fountains of wishful thinking for me. That maybe someday, I won't be so jaded anymore.
Yet, it's when the beat drops that attention is uniquely captured. There is confusion, but then the song always pulls you back in.
Earlier today, the beat dropped. I never see Sacramento anymore these days. Thanksgiving and this moment are the first times that I have been home since The Break. So the thoughts, "This is where I used to go with Phuc..." are very new to me, but they're thoughts that I can't help but have. I have the capacity to accept them as normal for someone in a situation like me, and I easily move on without losing my stride. But it was strange to stand outside of the frozen yogurt place that Phuc and I used to go to every Friday after theater rehearsal, and to walk into the doors of the bowling alley that Phuc and I frequented when we took a summer class together at the community college.
It built up, and very abruptly, while I was waiting at a stagnant red light, the sounds all tuned out and I wondered,
"...Why did Phuc break up with me?"
It was a question that I went nearly seven months without knowing the real answer. I look back, and I remember, "Our relationship isn't where I want it to be," and, "It's not the same anymore." I remember, "Well, I didn't want to break up with you while you were sad," and I remember him angrily telling me that I was the one responsible for ruining us. I recalled only vague explanations without a clear reason.
And then I remembered.
It was nothing short of a memory that I had blocked out. We sat there together, on my small living room couch. He sat to the left of me, holding his hands together. My extremities were still numb from morphine. I can't remember if he managed eye contact.
"I feel like if I stay with you, then I'm going to have a mental breakdown."
I sat there in front of the persistent red light, and while cars sped by me, and while the radio was playing at high volume, it felt like silence. I was almost sad.
Almost sad, when I then remembered that I'm done with that now. I'm done with every single fiber of that life now. I am done with the girl whose lack of life revolved around worthlessness. I want to go into the past and buy Past Christa a scoop of her favorite strawberry cheesecake ice cream, because I feel so damn bad for her. I want to push the hair back from her face, knowing that she totally digs it when people do that, and tell her about the fuse inside her.
She's blind to it, but there's a fuse inside her, longing for a blaze. I want to tell her that all the song will come back to her life, that her deaf ears will soon behold themselves to symphonies and major chords. But I can't, and it's okay. That's okay.
Because she'll find out herself soon enough.
I sure did.