Some Body Song Writer's Note Excerpt

when i turned 21 i started slowing down. and i mean really slowing down. i spent my entire life with a deep sense of urgency that lit a fire so vicious under my ass you’d think i was running from hell, or death, or something so ominous and looming and terrifying and invisible that maybe, just maybe I was imagining it all together. i don’t know why i always felt the need to rush. i never took the advice of slowing down to smell the roses until my childhood was officially free from the ever suspended and ever loosening hold i had on it. when i turned 21 i didn’t really feel all the things i thought i would. except excitement about buying my own alcohol, that is. i can’t explain what i hated so much about asking my friends, who loved me, to buy it for me. maybe the feeling of having to rely on someone other than myself for something so trivial bothers me. 

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i started noticing more when i slowed down. i’d already started to feel more of the beauty in the world when i turned 18. in that sweet liminal space between teenagerdom and true adulthood, arbitrary and useless markers meant to help make sense of this life, i watched a universe come alive. one that’d been with me, near me, within my grasp, at my fingertips even. i felt the aliveness in me, vivid and relentless. 

but slowing down was different. when i ride the bus, i watch others watching me through their eyes, their reflection. did they see me at all? i don’t mind. i felt my layers of self spread apart like thin tendrils of tissue paper, unsure where i started and ended, where i met the gaze of another and where they began too. i melted into the world while feeling annexed by and in it. it mapped its wanderings onto me, the wanderings of the clouds meandering through the sky, some days diligent, some days sore. the wanderings of the trees and their leaves, shyly dropping leaves after the solstice passed and becoming braver as the days grew chilly and cold. i grew chilly and cold, as i do each winter when the sun abandons me to rest early. but when i slowed down it gave what little warmth remained the chance to seep into me. sometimes in my toes, sometimes in my nose, sometimes in my cheeks. always in my stomach. that could’ve been the liquor, but i think it was the love. 

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smoke dances differently in the light. i listen to smoke rings by sam cooke when i smoke my joints, unsure of whether it’s because he is a genius or because he makes me feel like one. or perhaps both. or perhaps neither, and it’s my deep desire to be the brooding, the mysterious, the unknown entity floating through the world around me. oh how i crave that, trivial as it may seem or sound. i wish i really was melting into the world, into its seams, not into hiding but into the fabric that makes it what it is. seeping in like dye. no longer human. that’s what i itched for. watching smoke rings dance away from me in ways i knew i could twist and turn if i raised my arm just so.

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it cooled me like water on a parched throat. soothing and seeping all over me, a cool balm rubbed over my tender skin. i found intimacy on countless porches and steps, staring at the cement or the sky waiting for it to stare back at me, wait for it to speak to me. i wasn’t home in my body much, but the moment i was able to return to it were always found in a special sweet solitude. something like the first sip of water in the morning, making you feel the outline of your throat and insides like a sharp and unhesitant reminder that breath and life is in you. then you’re there. in it. back in your heart and head again. however fleeting and passing. i remind myself that i can do what i want and what i love. i remind myself that it’s hard to be happy when you can’t always access those things. i remind myself that school and work and this world weigh heavy sometimes. i remind myself that my shoulders are broad and strong and they carry. i remind myself that i also break. over and over and over again.