Fourteen years

Today is the day I feel naked, unzipped, unhinged. Silly really, but there you have it. Fourteen years ago, today, The Tragedy happened. Around about exactly now actually. I commented to G this morning that in all those fourteen years, each 1st of December has dawned as bright and blue and sunny as that one in 1996. I normally take the day off and do something beautiful. This time, I’m at Real Work. Feeling naked, unzipped, unhinged. The clouds are coming over. Weird. Maybe it’s because I came to work. I will do something beautiful over the weekend.

Everything just seems so close to the surface when I think about it. It’s watery and bare and it stings a little and it feels like yesterday that I lay on my dig’s carpet in the room I had packed up into a couple of boxes and a suitcase – four years of learning, living, loving, completely carefree (except, of course, for some good doses of teenage angst) into so little material stuff and so much wonderful ‘internal’ stuff. I listended to Eddie Vedder sing Off He Goes loudloudloud on my Walkman and cried fat tears for leaving that life behind. It feels like yesterday, but it was yesterday fourteen years ago.

Little did I know how big and fat those tears were. Maybe I did know. Maybe that’s why they were bigger, fatter, hotter. Or maybe they’ve just turned into that in the time that has passed since.

I am still here.



Off He Goes, Pearl Jam

Know a man
His face seemed pulled and tense
Like he's ridin' on a motorbike
In the strongest winds
So I approach with tact
Suggest that he should relax
But he's movin' much too fast

Said he'll see me on the flip side
On this trip he's taken for a ride
He's been takin' too much on
There he goes with his perfectly unkept hope
There he goes

He's yet to come back
But I seen his picture
It doesn't look the same up on the rack
We go way back
I wonder 'bout his insides
It's like his thoughts are too big for his size

He's been taken...where, I don't know
Off he goes with his perfectly unkept hope
There he goes

And now I rub my eyes, for he has returned
Seems my preconceptions are what should have been burned
For he still smiles... And he's still strong
Nothing changed but the surroundin' bullshit
That has grown

And now he's home and we're laughin'
Like we did, my same old, same old friend
Until a quarter to ten
I saw the strain creep in
He seems distracted and I know just what is going to happen next

Before his first step, he's off again