Day 115
Today I woke up to the sound of the smallest bird chirp. At first I thought it was an insect, or a squirrel, but then it came again, musical and inquisitive. I imagined it on the other side of the cabin wall, chirping, then tilting its little head, listening. Doing it again.
It’s not a sign you moron, I say to myself, but not out loud. I am trying to be nicer to myself. It’s what you would want for me, I know that. I always knew that.
Yesterday I listened to the song Silver Springs for the first time, I didn’t know the story behind that song, but I didn’t need to - the video tells the whole saga. Stevie keeps glancing at Lindsey and he doesn’t even glance up. Time cast a spell on you but you won’t forget me, she sings, as he much-too-studiously plays his guitar. They are broken up, he has moved on and the band is back together, as if the two of them could sing these songs they wrote about each other like nothing ever happened. Turns out they couldn’t.
Lindsey plays it cool, focused on his guitar solo but it feels like an evasion, even just as a viewer I can feel the white hot need in Stevie’s glances. She is fishing for salmon when it comes to Lindsey though, trying to snag him with the hook of her eyes but he is not biting. Finally she stops glancing and just turns to face him fully, singing with an intensity you can actually see in her lower jaw. Lindsey finally recognizes what is happening - or possibly, recognizes he now has no chance not to acknowledge what is happening - and engages that twin laser beam stare of demanding loss and regret.
you’ll never get away from the sound of the woman that loves you, they sing, staring directly into each others eyes.
I cried for them, for their lost love which is really just lying there at their feet, still alive and (barely) breathing, but both have issued a DNR it would seem, so the rest of us just watch it slowly, slowly bleed out.
Now that you are gone, I find I can’t bear to witness wasted love. I want to walk up to the love wasters and just cry out inarticulately, show them the bombed out cavity of my chest. You’re going to regret throwing away a chance to love, I would say. You’re going to regret it so much. Because once it’s gone and you fucking know it, know it down in your empty heart where you run through the rooms calling for someone who is not coming back, nothing will ever be the same again.