my life in songs

Looking back at what songs define where I was or how – the xx still makes me feel lonely and quiet and drinking cider on the bus and maybe a little bit of softly-lit surface-level multi-heartbroken, too.  There’a a Butch Cassidy remix of a Band of Horses song that I listened to on repeat then – straightening my hair and spending my Saturday nights with an apple by myself in a rose-themed bath.

There’s a song I’m sure was only played to J. and I in Australia – it’s a dance song and you all know it but I’m perfectly sure – just perfectly, perfectly sure – that she and I are the only ones that have ever heard it, too.  It lit up nights out and days in and bus rides.  Those days were filled with Ben Howard’s Old Pine, too, a song that could make anyone feel little bigger and a little smaller inside at the same time.

There was a summer of Nicki Minaj – she makes me think of a boy I thought of then.  I spent that (distant, now) summer on my bike (like always, I guess) with Nicki or else spinning around secretly with someone I’d bounced right into, right off of meaning and into a pair of open arms.

The next summer was driven entirely by that song by Of Monsters and Men.  You know the one I’m talking about – your summer was driven by it too.  I lived that summer inside my skull and forgot to turn on the lights the entire time.  This song made me cry.  What didn’t?

Last year’s cold days in the library I floated on a foggy sea of Alt-J.  How could I listen to anything else?  I was alone again but it was okay this time – drifting from a summer of jagged unexpectancies and a sort of choking sadness into a year of ambivalent okayness. 

I’m kind of still there and it’s a little bit astonishing to me, sometimes, to realize that I’m as steady as a prairie road.  I’m surprised to see my body is ok with how I’m treating it in all but the most superficial manner.  Obviously, I listened to nothing but Major Lazer for months.  How could someone so oddly floatitioned listen to anything else, you know?

tell me (let me)

I tell myself a lot of stories, usually just a line or two of my life.

We size our successes against those of others, we forget how enormous they are in the face of someone else's showy and colossal successes. Our problems, though, we measure only against ourselves. Our problems are enormous; we forget how lucky we are to have the problems we do. It's an incredible blessing that the worst thing I have to fear is mediocrity.

I think a lot about this mythological happiness that we're all chasing, some dream state where all things and feelings are warm and your mind is always well-lit and flushed with roses. That dream state is all that keeps us going, but I at least really have to accept that it's okay to just be okay. There's no failure in not having a bliss to follow. It might show up one day or it might not. In the meantime, stasis is a few worries that refuse to heal over and a few small pleasures, tumbling about my every day. 

It's so much more convenient not to believe in love.

I would like to evacuate all the feelings from my body now

and instead of having feelings I will exclusively fall in love with mountains and go on dates with them and I will sit on the hillsides and the sun will be kind of warm on my skin but also not quite warm enough?  And the mountain will be like "I am a mountain, I do not have a jacket to give you" and I will be like "that's okay mountain, I am pretty self sufficient anyways" and then I'll go back to my cabin and wear a big sparkly dress and drink champagne by myself.  It's nice to date a mountain because you don't have to share your champagne.

all photos by miss j. sebeer.

Seattlite

Pigeon toes, wandering by myself on tiles with a million names. I embraced optimistical possible possibilities. I'm speaking mostly to my subconscious, your sleeping self is speaking too. I'm curious, as I certainly was.

Living in these bones is impossibly boring. I looked up a map to living a sparkling lemonade life but my city pushed me here and i'm marking myself return-to-sender. I'm completely fine and well, but no one's just fine and well with a sparkling lemonade of a life.

Ugh, this confusion. Know that you'll find me, mind pulled back into my core and secure to my spine, back where I was, marked fire on the map. Picture, for one second, a satellite moving around the earth. 

worrisome things in my google search history

"i'm alive and I"

"craig"

"how many pages is a 92,000 word book?"

"I just want some goddamn salad rolls"

"outfits for old ladies"

"the girl with the best hair in the entire world, ever"

"khloe kardashian height"

"my roommate loves spring what do i do"

no for real though

better than an ostrich

this is how I feel about exams right now

hi world

come date me now pls

I will also accept:

invitations to rap battle

frozen mango chunks

any yoga challenges you care to make available

your offer to call all my exes and see if they maybe think about me sometimes, too

your first-born puppy 

time on time on time to sit in the sun and think about trees

jewelery that is either very delicate or aggressively dazzling

compliments

 

ecosystemic

I'm super interior; all I can do is keep track of my own forest

hardly saffron

All I can do is express myself in drawings in my mind, nothing I can realize on the page.  I can't help but be exactly who I am, which is goddamned shame a mathematical majority of the time.

I'm imprinted in ink, a close and frenetic scribble.  Press your pen to the page and clench your fist, try to resist. 

A close and frenetic scribble, pen marks straying to the edge of the page.  I'm trying to pull

(try to resist hurting anyone, and by anyone you mostly mean you)
I'm trying to pull myself together.

I am I am

I've been quiet lately, I know.  I don't know if my time is too full to leave spaces for poetry or my brain is too full or what.  Sometimes it's just that other people write so sickening well and I know that's a fever I'll never sweat.

I'm trying to melt individualism out of everyone around me; hack out chips of humanity from that beautiful or unbeautiful mass.  I'm getting to a point with my new friends, peeling back smiles and style and trying to chisel away to some sort of core.  All I know I know outside out.

I'm trying to take a couple of steps back from myself for a day or two.  I know this blog is a constant paean to every emotion I've ever felt and I don't mind it that way, but maybe both it and I need a break.  I've been taking one, anyways.

I'm endlessly internal.

sizing

I play with ideas of myself and the world, I stack them up and knock them over again and again.  I'm frustrated with utility, I write puzzles and dreams, I see myself reflected in a thousand panes of glass scattered around the map like pins.  I'm built to shine quietly and ferociously and I'm built with the gleam of a million or two others.

I can't pretend at uniqueness, I'm no artist, I know.  I blank out blank canvases and paint twelve pictures in sync.  The work I produce hangs in galleries around the full-text version of my mind, downloadable and accessible from very few ports.

I'm an exclusive carbon-copy, both beaming and dull.  I'm my own ivory tower and I'm surrounded by giants.  I could seal myself into my mind forever, echo beats off my bones and know a glittering chronological luxury.  Dress up my intellect in furs and spin it around, present a dizzy bow to the opera house.

But I'm an automaton.  Marching forwards forever and climbing up laws like a staircase, looking onwards at due dates and grasping at straws.  I can't pretend at uniqueness, I'm no artist, I know, but I'm doing a wonderful job at pretending to like this.

courtesy of jessi

bearing/teeth

I'm sorry, it's been a while.  Let me tell you about a few things I want to accomplish this year.

one

Talk less shit.  Everyone benefits.

two

Work harder.  I'm pairing this carefully with nos. four, five, and six.

three

South America.  Sorry, mom, I don't think I can bear to stay in one place for more than six months at a time.

four

Be better to myself.  I'm alright, I'm okay.

five

Be better to myself.  I'machine, you'rengine.

six

Be better to myself.  There's only so much.

seven

Tell me who you run with and I'll tell you who you are.