So, HAERTS just walked up to my dinner table, took my head in their hands, and beat it the fuck into the hardwood below. Smack, Smack. Yo, these words are moseying on melodies right past you. Listen. And I’m not going to call them assholes, because Nina Fabi’s voice is like a salve to any wound. Don’t be a hater because they made you listen to the whispers in your veins. Don’t rail against a revelation, those words passed through your aorta every few seconds, and you weren’t hearing them. Those words, that table smack: they helped me know I’m done.

I’m giving up

I sat there a bit in a daze, though. Revelations, they don’t come to me. I’m not a little earthquake type of thinker. They especially aren’t cooed uncautiously in my ear by someone else. Fuck that. I’ve got a CIA waving guns and a Claire Danes fucking my way past the subterfuge of any other saying the battle is won. Look, I relish an end to all the bloodshed, I even pissed in my pants at the possibility. I don’t want to spend 2am walking down highways and watch madness not fade at any mile marker. Color me suspicious of an insight that lands in the boundaries of me. How did/does anyone know where the lines even are? Words spill out their mouths; but really, for what the world knows I have one leg in an NYC subway, the other tapping in Tokyo.

4 years ago I stopped talking.

Now I’m a stranger in my own world

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Those darkest nights, I needed to talk. Fuck, I needed to talk. I’m aces at keeping the horde of huge emotions at bay that come with waves of trauma. Maybe one or two get through, and a day of pirouetting through depression happens. Sans a family, no one’s pulling the thoughts, the crisis that slash at me off their ladders, stabbing them kidney shot style as they climb the walls of my castle. I get by. In 2010, though, they were coming in every ten minute tsunamis, the whole year. I swear they were crawling out the spectral ass of Stalin and Thatcher fully armed and at a sprint. Vicious motherfuckers.

And I look at the people that pounce on me with questions and think

It’s not your fault that I can’t use words
I’m a stranger, I’m gone

I say pounce, but this is your 411 party trivia, who the fuck is that drinking my beer caliber of question. I am 50 shades of jackass for shimmying down the sidewalk past their questions. You don’t hear me anyway. That’s where my 2010 brain and trauma meet the world. That talk was offensive, when I couldn’t vocalize why I stopped  fighting for my life. I was sitting in a closet with full moon pupils of fear, counting down the siege with cuts on my forearm. That year I didn’t have any happy stories to say, so my voice became verboten. I was sick all the time, my body always shouting at me. But I kept silent because 104 degree fevers grow more savage when met with silence. And I worried the emotions would swallow me, break me. And they did. Even thinking of typing the words of where I ended up is a torrent of terror. This wasn’t me. I didn’t tell anyone it wasn’t.

My expectation of others became silence. I was happier. And it became my norm for so long that I forgot the world ran down different streets at one time. But HAERTS have a way of bitchslapping me back into being halfway human. Last year, “All The Days” was the uppercut to the sternum that jolted my shithead of a heart. That chorus fucked me up. I sang it thousands of time into a whiskey bottle. All the memories shot back into me with each shot. They’d bubble into my blood of it being midnight and me telling hopes, scrawling secrets onto a cerebellum, so that I had a friend who could always find their way to what made me, me.

That was last November. I’d like to say I’ve made progress since then. Yeah, but nope. It’s been a year punching in the air at ‘Where are you from?  I spent the last year wondering why I shunned simple shoutouts by others that noticed you were alive.  I didn’t really get it until “Giving Up”, and suddenly I was

Racing, my heart breaks through my chest
[it’s] an electric reaction in me
And I know,
It’s not a choice to dance dangerously
It’s now or never

Let it go. Let it go. Give it up. Leave your ghost heart back in 2010. There’s no relief in those dreams.  It’s not weak to have been weak. The black eye left by the song, however, is. If a song hits so hard it shows how silent your sneakers were walking on the lives of others, life needs to change. Leave a mark, kick a shin once in awhile. Speak.

I’m giving in
Giving up strong

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