life.love.regret.

Something from a fellow old soul tonight-and my first guest post.  He captures poignant love and the hurt of losing it with a simple elegance, and without killing any marines.  Thank you James, for sharing this with me and for let me in turn share it with others. 


Before I get started, that's a particularly concise and evocative phrase. Good job, Unbroken.

Three words that have turned out to be a fairly popular t-shirt, if you think of the hardcore punk community as a runway. But those three words have quite a bit attached to them. life.love.regret, perhaps foremost, is a mid-90's genre defining record by San Diego straight edge band Unbroken. Suffice to say they were loud, heavy and wrote songs that turned mosh pits turn into hospital visits. Much more would bore you with description. Tellingly, Unbroken did a cover of Joy Division's Love Will Tear Us Apart.

Now you know what the t-shirt stands for, but I think that phrase is wrong and myopic at best and straight up lying at worst.  The kids who wear the Unbroken t-shirts, are not, at the time of wearing the t-shirt, historically known for being happily married.  In other words, life.love.regret skews young and I'm writing it with us in mind.

Here's the thing. life.love.regret. as a sentence clearly articulates a mindset, that you will live, you will love someone and what comes after that love are regrets, piling all the things you should have done in hindsight on top of you, like a blanket.

That feeling of loss is what life.love.regret speaks so vividly and absolutely about. Maybe loss isn't the right word. The more I think about it, what's more precise or less wrong than loss is the word unpublished. The knowledge that there are feelings and expressions and emotions that can't or shouldn't be accessed anymore. There was something there, but now it's not and instead there is only a conspicuous absence, or a blank spot in the shape of where he/she/they/whomever curled up next to you or said something that triggered your dopamine receptors or however it is that science works and that swelling, headswimming feeling inside you happens and you realize you love them, that's











gone.


life.love.regret is about that. It's memorializing that feeling. Perhaps even worse, enshrining it. Sure, there is haunting and passionate art that comes from that pain, it's powerful, after all. It's also universal. In the previous paragraph, I'm not talking about anything you as a human being haven't already experienced. If you live long enough, this will happen to you. There will be almost primeval volumes of it. It will intoxicate you.

If it hasn't happened already, I can only promise you that it will. And I'm sorry.  But more than that?  You will lie in places where you wouldn't stand, to quote Planes Mistaken For Stars, a band that covered Unbroken.  You might even do worse things afterwards. You'll make mistakes and those will be tragic, stupid or any combination between the two. That loss is rough and in trying to fill that explicitly, you'll fail.

And the loss will not fade, not if you're thinking about it that way, which makes it a dramatic thing to put on a t-shirt.

But if you don't think about it like that? More things happen to you. And as the more things that happen transpire and more yarn is added to the sweater of your life, the less central the loss gets. In 2008, I had my head fucked with, brutally, by people that were trying to protect themselves. That sounds big but it just means the relationships got bad, it got too heavy and they bowed out in ways that were not graceful. Unsurprisingly, alcohol was a lubricant.

I spent a couple months of spring 2009 dealing with the psychic fallout. It was the first time something of that magnitude happened to me. It devastated me at the time, but since then, I've been talking easily about it like ancient history, war stories from a magical time before Twilight, when the conclusion of Harry Potter was the widest collective supernatural event in our recent memory.

That's what life.love.regret. misses. Your life continues, if you let it. Yeah, being discarded with the rapidity and purpose of a filled condom suuuuuucked and was one of those "defining" moments, but you know what else was a defining moment? Getting drunk in November 2010 with the guy who writes Uncanny X-Men. That pain and turbulence from 2008 and 2009 are hilarious stories at this moment. It's not like those stories are any less important or that pain was any less real, but that distance heals quite a bit because I chose not to make those things or those people central in my life.nny

Put simply, life.love.regret. by virtue of its period, dramatically ends the thought. Put even simpler: life.love.regret. means regret is the last thing. Regret is what you're left with. That's not really the end, is it? You must go on. You must keep living. After all, there are classes or you are scheduled for work in the morning. All things pass in the microscopic skirmishes of our daily lives.

And that's good! As amazing as being in love, wrapped up in lust and losing consciousness exhausted in their arms is, the feeling will happen again with a different person. This love is not the final love. True, tomorrow isn't promised and one ought to live accordingly, but live is the important verb there.

Sharks must move forward to keep feeding and the truism's apt. To keep living, and truly, sincerely, living, the forward momentum that life.love.regret. inhibits is crucial.



Thanks, Emily for the space and the platform. I've wanted to write this for years and only knew it a couple weeks ago.

Christmas in the District

She is young, and he is too.  They're sitting on a park bench along side the river, and they're holding hands.  A bird hops close enough to eye her shoelace suspiciously, and she stares back with equal curiosity.  He turns away from her and spits words into the wind.  They snap across the thick autumn wind.
"You're not as young as you used to be, anyway." 
His eyes are roving a group of coeds, squealing on a blanket nearby, fingers frantically texting on sleek bejeweled phones. 
She does not reply, but looks down at her bare knees.  Blue veins pop out and up, distorting the milky skin.  Her hands fold themselves quickly on top of her legs, and she leans out to look at the rippling water.
"I'm not old yet;" it slips out of her mouth as a whisper but he is too intent on a bronze haired lass to notice her slight decent.

The next week it starts snowing.  Just little flurries of flakes drifting from the sky; enough to excite children who are playing with their nannies on the browning lawn.  They're back on their bench, his hands stuck into his jeans and her nose reddening in the frosty air. 
"I don't know why the hell you dragged me out here today.  It's god damned near freezing."
"We used to come to the river all the time in winter, you remember watching the ice break the spring before last."
"Yeah well, maybe one of us has lost a little of their extra blubber."
He eyes her waist, which grows under his stare.  Her jacket puffs out and she looks away, trying to conceal her embarrassment.  There are no young ladies to hold his attention this time, and so he stands and waits for her to do the same.  Her reluctance makes him impatiently scuff his feet.
"You used to tell me I was pretty all the time."
"You were."

They don't come back for two months after that.  The holidays are approaching and the park is frequented by a sole chipmunk, foraging candy wrappers and breadcrumbs.  One day an old woman shuffles down the path and carefully lowers herself onto the cold bench.  Her eyes may have been blue once, but now they're clouded over and sit below sagging lids.  Lines map their way across her face and her neck and chin collapse into themselves in folds of flesh.  A rattling sigh escapes her thin lips,  a hand reaches up to brush itself across the white hair. 
"I am ugly.  I am old."
She speaks to no one in particular, but the chipmunk stops it's scurrying momentarily to stare at the stranger.  She is still.

 Morning papers announce the tragedy: a woman, age 23, frozen to death last night by the Potomac.  Survived by her parents and a grieving fiance.  She was so young, so beautiful. 

Fight for me, damn it.

Two am

What can I say lover? I miss you.

What goes around

Hey you,
with the horrible hair and the penciled on eyes.  Or maybe you're sixteen and have a kid slung across your hip; maybe again you're sixty five and you reach in an over sized purse to take out a carefully tabulated list of coupons.  I'm you're friendly sales associate, and I have something to tell you:
You're not witty.  Or cute.  Or vaguely amusing.  And I don't care about you as a person at all, when I look at you I see is big dollar signs.
Honestly. 

Whats more, I don't care to clean up after you.  They don't pay me enough.  When you're snot nosed six year old daughter rips open a fresh lip gloss off the shelf and starts eating it, don't look at me and glib, "Kids!"  I don't find it amusing.  I see my paycheck, walking out the door on your daughters now shiny lips.

Sometimes I fantasize about destruction.  I would like to go to your house and spill cherry soda on the floor, rip the cloths out of your closet and dump them in a pile, do it all with a holier then thou attitude.  I believe in karma though, and retail karma is one of the best kinds.

Next week when you bring something back, that same glossy lipped girl now in tears about her favorite shirt that shrunk in the wash, I will hand it back and smile.
"I'm sorry.  This item can clearly not be returned."

Go ahead and threaten, but on the inside I'm dying in laughter.  My manager won't care, and neither will the company.  After all, all you are is money in the bank.
The only thing that can save you is kindness and decency, areas in which you are clearly lacking.

So the next time a girl like me looks at you and says "Is there anything I can do to help you?"  just smile and thank her.    Because someday, when she finishes her college degree, she is going to walk into your office, and she is going to be introduced as your new boss.  And then you had better look at her and smile and say "What can I do for you today?"

After dark

Sometimes at night he grabs me and kisses me full on the lips with forgotten passion.  We heave against each other for quiet seconds, searching each other for some answer to all the wrongs. 

He never remembers in the morning.

Last night he caught me up and I was limp, and still he pushed himself against me and caressed me with surprising tenderness.

I wish I knew who she was, that dream girl who inspires him so.  She is lucky to have all of his passion and none of his spite.

Tribute

I used to write for you.  When you said it "just didn't make sense," and that you "didn't bother to read the first part," well that stung baby.  But maybe now I'm free. 
Now I can write all the dark things I've been thinking, it will probably be months before you read them.  By then I will be ready for the fight, ready for you to mope and misinterpret and get angry.  All the reasons I stopped writing in the first place. 
Now if I start killing off brown eyed boys you won't notice.  Go back to your game darling,
I'm writing again.