The double-edged sword of knowing you are not loved and knowing you have waited so long you would not how to love, even if you finally did ever find her. An unexpected song plays on the radio and it might as well have punched you in the stomach, it hits you so hard. 

The tears in your eyes are falling so fast and hard you have to pull over and you wonder how it has gotten so bad that the slightest little thing...a favorite song coming on, something forgotten at the grocery store, your phone left at home...can leave you undone.

You can feel so sad about how things have turned out in your life (and also mad when you realize a lot of it is your own fault) and how you strongly suspect you have met the person you could really, truly love but they do not feel the same, could never feel the same, and so you look for anything to help ease the pain and you see this and you think maybe you should not be beating yourself up for feelings you know you should not have:
 

 

Sometimes we love people who can only be in our hearts, not our lives...I like this pin because it says to me...that, sometimes, we have to just love people silently and that it is okay to do that when we cannot and should not out loud...♥

Sometimes I feel like I can exactly pinpoint the last time my sister and I really got along and were even maybe good friends who would have had a connection even had we not been related. It was 1985 and my sister was a Madonna fanatic...even going to school, like a million other girls across America at the time, dressed like the singer during her "Desperately Seeking Susan" days. I liked Madonna, too, but my like was very lukewarm compared to my sister's and other than that we had little in common with our music interests. We hadn't since we played David Naughton's 1979 "Makin' It" so much on our turntable we wore the single out.

One day, though, my sister came trough the door, having just returned home from shopping with her friends at the mall and she pulled out a cassette from a Sam Goody bag. She really liked the single "I Didn't Mean To Turn You On" and like me she would often buy an entire album just based on having heard one or two songs at the most. Back then you really had no choice unless the 45 single just happened to be backed with the other song you liked.

I didn't pay much attention to what she was playing until I heard this amazing and frenetic thumping coming from her room. Enticed, I went in and asked her what the song was and she told me it was Robert Palmer. And all I could think of was how different this song sounded from "I Didn't Mean To Turn You On" and how much better and less scary and dark it was too. The song title sounded like an insult (who wants to be called 'hyperactive' after all?) but actually proved itself to be a really poppy love song/anthem the more my sister played it.

There are days I think about how much we both liked that album and how I sometimes actually mourn the loss of the relationship we once had, the way we only really had each sometimes when our parents were not getting along or our mother was mad at both of us or it was too cold or rainy outside to play with the neighborhood kids. I hate nostalgia, I really, really hate it...not because I don't see the appeal of wanting to go back to better times, better days (I do), but because I don't see the point. There are no time machines, after all, and regression is hardly healthy, mentally or physically. Still, some things are easier said than done and you can't deny those times the heart misses what it misses...

Maybe, but maybe you could also say: sometimes you can ruin things and never get the chance to get that first impression back.

I tried everywhere to find something about what happens when (or at least you are pretty sure) your first impression with someone was actually okay, but the second (and third and fourth and so on) impressions are the ones you have mucked up. You did not try to botch things AND, in fact, you continue to flail because you like the person you have messed things up with so much. I find it so very heart-breaking and utterly bewildering that the more you care about things and people, the more you can totally mess up and even ruin things with them. :(

Really, I do not know where I am going with this except to say that I am flailing a lot lately in many areas and I am finding, much to my horror, that my attention span has become so poor I can barely read a book straight through anymore, the one thing I always had to escape my own thoughts. And a buzzed up, but unfocused brain makes it very hard to sleep, which takes another way of escaping away from you. I have never been a big fan of Hemingway, but when I read this quote from him my heart went out to the guy because I think I know exactly what he meant...

This...

This is one of the reasons I have stuck with Life After Life, by Kate Atkinson, which can be a bit draggy (emotionally and plot-wise) and disjointed (purposely so and to great effect) at some points, but is ultimately one of the best things (and also one of the few books to have held my interest in a while) I have read recently. The writing is always good, even if it takes a good thirty or so pages before it gets going in a way that makes you want to keep reading...

Some mornings are harder than others...and some mornings you will look for peace or something to hold on to in the weirdest of places. I have not had much patience, time or even interest to read the Sunday papers lately, but I was straightening my unread ones from yesterday so that maybe I can read them when I get home from work tonight and the New York Times Style Magazine, sometimes just called T, fell out and onto the floor and when I picked it up it had opened to this page. Both the image and the words really jumped out at me:

 

I had never heard of Candy Darling before, but found more about her here:

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candy_Darling