I've been listening of late to albums that I played a lot during my youth, and today R.E.M.’s 'New Adventures in Hi-Fi' has stuck a chord with recent events and their inspiration for the the much needed emotional work I'm doing.
Yesterday 'The Wake Up Bomb' was selected by Spotify during my morning walk. I had to pause the track whilst asking if 'everything was in hand' to a group of girls - one of them on the floor receiving treatment for a nasty cut on her foot with blood, drying fast in the heat sticking to the pavement. One girl stated another was a nurse, and so I let them know where the nearest docs was (very close) and went on with my walk, looking back and smiling as I saw an ambulance, backed up in traffic due to the daily rubbish collection, stop at the scene - this girl had plenty of care available, and not even by request.
After hearing this track from the album, I had to go find the complete record and listen through, from a different perspective from the 17 year old who bought the album in 1996 - with proceeds for almost a full days work filing and or stacking shelves. As I listened through, the sounds and lyrics arrived like a mirror.
And the reflection - a relationship I shouldn’t have been in which was quietly making me ill. So, a breakdown of me — through the lens of four tracks that marked the beginning, the middle, the moment I woke up, and the moment I finally said enough.
So Fast, So Numb – The High and the hollowness
You’re moving through my veins / You're like the cold, cold blood to my soul
This is how it began — not as something gentle or stable, but as something electric or like a backdraft taking place when you open a door in a blazing building without checking for heat or smoke first. Something that bypassed logic and went straight into my nervous system. She didn’t arrive like love but more like an intoxicating, relentless fire, and I let it in.
Bypassing logic and hitting like a class A, it felt like being seen with moments of pure aliveness, but beneath it my body knew something wasn't right.
You're coming onto something so fast, so numb that you can't even feel
The sense that something reckless had been let in, and now it was too late to undo. I didn’t feel safe but I felt wanted, and the child confused the two.
Bittersweet Me – The Dissonance
You move across, innocence lost. All static and desire.
Knowing deep down I/we were being horrible people, and glossing over that for just a few hours a week.
I couldn't taste it
I'm tired and naked
I don't know what I'm hungry for
I don't know what I want anymore
...
I don't know who you're living for
I don't who you are anymore
This was the part of the relationship, prior to cohabiting, where things got blurry. Lots of confusion, mixed signals, parts of me I had to switch off, or even clearer now, my body switching off e.g. Fainting with worry and shame, stress highlighting an impaired kidney that suffered in mostly silence until now.
I'd wake up with that heaviness in my gut, literally. 'Rest and Digest' being overruled by 'Fight or Flight', sleep became more and more interrupted and my distended stomach clearly very upset. But I waited, cause that's what I new, that's what the boy understood was love.
I'd sooner chew my leg off / Than be trapped in this
Numerous times my words spoke of ending what we had started, but my actions didn't mirror those words. And so ever hopeful/blind/intoxicated/ and almost fully seen, the boy continued to wait, catching only glimpses that surviving those many months 'hanging on' came with consequences.
We/I got what we/I thought we/I wanted though, at least for a few months. But as anyone I'd let in enough to see what was happening would hint -it's going to be tough to build anything including words such as lust, desire, lies, deceit, shame, and regret. I'm sure we both felt it, but failed to communicate it appropriately. Me, the no filter emotionally driven outbursts, her, the poker-faced delivery of emotions, sounding at times so withdrawn and sounding like notes from a phycologists notepad.
I read online that all new relationships should start with some therapy... that doesn't sound too unreasonable right now.
And so with needs unmet and eternal forgiveness and unfathomable tolerance waiting at 'home', she was gone. (The dynamics of this relationship, oh my! but again, not my story and of little use to my journey now)
The Wake-Up Bomb – The Snap
And so from feeling most wanted, losing my job and then the girl, my self-worth plummeted to new lows. Perfect conditions really for a 'Hi, fancy lunch this week' message to land and be accepted, by the same hurt child. And so, it began again, almost like the first week - the fire of desire the same as it was, prior to owning up and confronting to life together.
As she departed, words of regret or a decision to end things between us made to hastily (with a 'lady week' reference thrown in), I felt something different. A different kind of upset and sadness, leading to anger, and a realisation - I can't physically go through this again.
I threw up when I saw what I'd done
Although I acknowledge now that this was and is not my battle, I resented that I couldn't see the guilt, the shame, and the undoing of her self-esteem and health, and that things were now back to suiting her needs.
My head's on fire and high esteem
Carry my dead bored, "been there, done that", uh, anything
Not again. Even if you can - how can you, how?
I had to knock a few buildings over, I make an ugly mess
I had to blow a gasket, drop transmission, I had to decompress
...
I wake up (Wake up), I wake up (Wake up)
This was my Wake-Up Bomb, fool me and fuck me up once...
Leave – The End
I can leave, but I won't go
I did though, on a Strawberry moon rising out of Sagittarius - my half-birthday and one most significant in 'my' stars - unbeknown to me at the time.
'Leave' contains a relentless siren that pulses through the entire song. I've always appreciated how bold it was for REM to slap that over a seven minute record. It wasn't background noise yesterday, but echo's of a toasted nervous system, a body in need of repairs, and a representation of peace being nowhere to be found if I continued this loop.
Now I dream a dream
I lost myself, I lost self
Are they calling me?
I lost myself in sorrow
I lost myself in pain
I lost myself in gravity
Memory, leave, leave, leave
Finally the urgent need to find peace in my whirring head became louder than the siren itself. I told some truths, enough to make clear I could no longer burn with her and no longer wanted to live like this.
I'm still leaving, I know it. One day at a time mate, eh?
Asher
You've played around, you played me lover
....
You're moving so hard, so fast, so numb
That you can't even feel