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