Sometimes you share so much that you drain yourself. I feel that way after I sing. After I really sing. When my throat is all chopped up and things are hazy and sort of out of reception. I could just burrow somewhere and hibernate. When I really rear back and sing, when I’m not thinking about what I’m singing, how I’m singing, it’s redemption, it’s a gap in time, a space that couldn’t comprehend anxiety or fear. I could command a sudden army, or break a stable of horses. And after, there is this space where everything feels numb - the house is burned down - there isn’t hardly an everything to feel.
A lot of today was like that. Today I shared my history and walked through the halls of another’s. We saw other people’s lives pasted up on massive walls and deconstructed into flashes of paint, into torn-out images wrenchingly arranged. Days like that are fascinating and cathartic and you can feel your darkest chasms taking on light, but as I drove away my heart wanted to nod off like a little kid on in the back seat on the long ride home. My heart had partied too hard.
A lot of tonight was like that too. I was confronted with a taste of my own history, in the back of a tour van with an old friend in the driveway of a beaten down house with a party swarming around us. And we were playing songs, writing songs, and I was fucking wailing. This was like we used to do. He used to pick me up in his band’s van when we both had some new songs, and we’d idle on some deserted corner, or find a picnic table in an empty park, and with whispered restraint, share the best of what we’d been creating. We’d give each other notes. These were our own little songwriting workshops. I’d get his approval, which I’d learned to trust, and then I’d be ready to sing for the world.
Now I don’t have much restraint. People kept climbing into the van. They were there, and they weren’t. I can sing loud over anything, anywhere, and it no longer phases me. I’m stronger within myself. I have a better idea if something I’ve written is ready - there's no such thing as ready. I don’t need his approval as much, or I should say, I now value my own approval so much more.
You don’t need to turn the stereo on when you head home from a day like that. You’re a shell, or some discarded bones, a light on a distant radio tower flashing on and off against the horizon. All of the longing that goes into a day, all of the need to connect, and to give, and have your isolated existence be recognized and understood in that of another - all of that is washed away. There is nothing to be accomplished. It’s time to rest.
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