a song

Currently reading:

Where I'm Calling From: Selected Stories

By Raymond Carver

Release date: 18 June, 1989

11:27 PM

           

a song

A song, a song, a song. Play me a song that is slow and sweet like cold molasses running out of a cherry licorice tap. A song that is perfect and warm like a shot of hundred dollar bourbon aged for a hundred years in a hundred different oak barrels in a hundred different ways.

A song like this can take you out of your big, old lonely head and into something else altogether. There is nothing better than listening to a song you 've heard so many times before, catching a chord change or lyric or the presence of a well hidden ukelele pluck that you have not heard before.

The melancholy words, soulful twist of each word dripping slowly off their lips and into your ears. Eyes closed, eyes must be closed. When taken somewhere else it is important not to see the same walls, computer, peach walls and broken down body throbbing from the day that just hit like a Mack truck at 90 miles per hour.

A song like this can break your heart, make you smile crookedly and shake your head because it is so true, so, so true and that is the thing that breaks your heart into a dozen hard to find pieces.

A song like this helps you remember what you've allowed yourself to forget throughout the day as it rushes past as you rush to catch up with it.

A song like this wishes you were in love and makes you cherish your independence in the same breath. Your severe and unrelenting independence that rests heavy on your shoulders like a pair of lead shoulder pads.

With a song like this I am everything I write about, every quirky character that longs for something she's never had before that she usually gets at the end of the story. The too strong for their own good character that allows someone to break through the hard, crusty layer at the end of the story. The character that allows herself to be moved and changed for ever, resolved at the end of the story. The loner that meets herself at the end of the story and is pleasantly suprised to know that she never really was alone.

You've heard 'em. You've wrapped them around you when you danced alone in your room, in front of the mirror, on your bed through every room. You've walked from kitchen to living room to office in that walk- dance combo that is saved for rock musicals and old Pat Benatar videos.