Songs for a Neophyte: 2015.32

Can't Pretend
Tom O'Dell

Since when did love grow dark?
Perhaps it was this beating drum,
An itchy sound at the back,
A crashing cacophony that breaks
Sudden
Into light I don't deserve.
When you wrote me down,
did you notice my spelling?
Or did you scribble too passionately?

Lyrics.
This is a childish, wonderful, aggressive view of love. This is Prince Charming saving Briar Rose from the castle where she was enchanted to sleep. This is driving a hundred miles on the weekends every weekend just to see somebody. This is choosing someone else over yourself because you're selfish enough to think they're more than you, somehow.

The first time I ever fell in love, I felt this way. I guess it's better for both of us that nothing came of it, that it (in fact) fell apart even before I realized my personal disaster. In fact, the letting-down of a long talk in the dying summer on a Friday afternoon was exactly what I deserved, even though I felt entitled to more. I think back to how magnanimous she was to talk for that hour with me, to attempt an explanation to a thing she didn't understand fully herself, and I feel the old sadness and loss again. I remember walking back to the ratty old apartment on the hill, sort of bawling my way along Apison Pike, and a classmate whose name I'll never remember stopping his car and calling to me across the road: "Do you need a ride, man? Are you okay?" I waved him off, and I don't even remember his name. He was too good for me.

The second time I ever fell in love, I felt this way. Even though I knew better, or should have, I threw myself headlong into it, and who wouldn't? Even with the benefit of hindsight, the two and some fraction years we spent together weren't what made me weak, after. The bond I built with her wasn't worthless just because she left. The value of the relationship wasn't negated by its end. And now, I think I did much better than the last time. Maybe, now, I was the one who listened more than I strictly speaking should have. Maybe, now, I was the one who went out of my way. Maybe, now, I was the one who, years afterward, can look back and strain to remember my drunken idiocy as I staggered through five days of ripping loss. Maybe, now, I'll be remembered in a good light by an ex.
Sadly, I know it's not the case. There's some perverse need in the human heart to remember yourself in a better light than originally illuminated you, and that need has driven something dark in me to be the entire picture she holds anymore. I'm not naive. I know these misconceptions are actually just exaggerations of a small truth well-hidden. I know she fears me because there's a real capability of violence that lives in my bones, evicted from my heart but still lurking somewhere else. I know she fears me because there's a hidden avarice in my aura, not alive in my actions but somehow visible through when the light hits me just so. I know she fears me because I could have found her address and seen where she lived and cried when I knew that she cheated on me, even though there's no reason for it, no desire for the memory, no will to make it happen. I'm not a perfect child of some forgotten race of higher beings. I'm disgusting like the rest of you, and she only amplified what was already there for her comfort.

Why do humans fall in love? We don't deserve it, even if we deserve each other.

Excellent song. I liked it a lot.

Stephen.
Tom O'Dell has tried just as hard as anybody. The production is polished just as mirror-shine as the last. The lyrics are, if possible, simpler. Why does this appeal to me, when the other doesn't?
I think there's some quality that I can perceive, or can convince myself that I perceive: some quality that separates hard-working effort from effort to appear hard-working. And you know there's a separation. I can write two poems, and you can see the difference between a sudden production and the careful result of hard work. It's not even actually that difficult to see, but there is difficulty in explaining the nuance that's there. How is this verb somehow better than that one? Why does this phrase seem better-formed? What has made the exaggeration in his voice more pleasant than her voice. And who has decided what better should be?

Perhaps I think about love too often. Maybe I'm partial because this song is for me. Either way, I'm glad you liked it enough to include it on the forty.