songwringing

original title: Strictly Professional

This is ripped from a 2012 email i sent to my supervisor turned first luv turned intermittent friend in which, after a sad experience involving drunken cuddles and timid not-so-heavy petting under the cover of the frigid rural night, i made it clear via email that i wanted our relationship to remain 'strictly professional from now on'. he never responded to that stilted / stunted message and i'm thinking now it was maybe bc i sent it to his work email which might have been visible to future pplz holding his position? oops. i'm sorry if i got you in trouble, sweet baws of yesteryear. but also you stole two years of my life, pumping them with desperate drafts to 'no recipient' at all on my lg slidephone and hypnogogic sensations that were not so welcome to a suffering 17 yr old me, so im not sorry at all. 

Influences: literally aretha franklin's 'daydreaming' and less literally syreeta's 'black maybe'

i wanted to use their drunken, sweet motown musings as a nice soup stock for an equally unmoored, washed-ashore ditty. 

Lyrics:

ch: Day drinkin and i'm thinking of you
one notification and i'll spew
day drinking n my brain is soaked thru
dont hold me then say i can't kiss you

this chorus describes the central theme of the song / the central experience that informs it. right now, i'm floating in a weird slimy extracellular fluid in which all i know is that i am desperate as fuck for affection and intimacy. this state led me to a place where i got so day-drunk that i found myself semi-blacked out in a bunkbed attached to my ex who gingerly avoided my lips but otherwise participated in the exchange of something like physical love. when he slinked away, i asked him frankly to kiss me from the bunkbed from which i could not pry my wilted person, to which he just woefully grimaced, leaving me w overwhelming feelings of shame and betrayal. i felt as if i was being parented, or looked out for; or as if he thought i was being creepily needy by wanting to be kissed, when i'm p sure he was the one who instated the cuddling configuration in the first place. to make me feel overly attached or like i was deluded re: our relationship made me angry and still does. i feel kind of sick when i think about being rejected, sexually, here but more importantly, emotionally. i couldve really used a friend in that moment instead of having him fearfully pull the plug and leave me to sink into my own filth. 

v1: nihilism saw me force a connection
nihilism saw you to my bed
i'm too fucking good for this knot in my chest
i'm too fucking good for this psychic bedrest

this describes a sad sexual encounter a week before the one previously described in which i unsuccessfully tried to use a douchebag's physical body to fill a void. it was all wrong and it was all bad and the fact that i slept w a disgusting homophobe that i feel ashamed even telling my good friends about is not smthn i'm living down to myself anytime soon. i shouldve gone home and eaten ice cream instead of gotten drunk enough to think this could lead to anything other than self-loathing and nausea for dayzzz. 

v2: an omnipresent material dream
a gaunt angel at my sickbed
your careful hold my stillborn fix
a bait and switch; my stomach lead

this describes my beautiful and cruel ex visiting me as a celestial and sadistic apparition. this weird second intimacy was as painful as it was with my first love (for which the song is named). both experiences were an unexpected but conditional drunken recoupling where familiar intimacy was reinstated but also carefully policed and thus feeding into a painful power imbalance at which the shame was unfairly allocated to me. 

drafts//stutters

Hey I just want you to know that I did not intend to cuddle with you yesterday and don’t know what circumstances led to that happening. Like I just remember suddenly being in a bunkbed and then you leaving and being kind of repulsed 

also, idk if you care but a million years ago I hooked up w Baknel again after a while apart and it was similarly sad because although we were touching each other, he wouldn’t kiss me and it made me feel similarly awful and alone and FYI: don’t solicit affection from someone but then make them feel foolish for wanting    . It’s a huge fucking power trip. I

I feel really shitty about yesterday. I don’t remember how we started cuddling and I didn’t think I was responsible, so you acting repulsed by me when you clearly were comfortable enough holding me kind of hurt and seemed like a power trip (whether intentional or not) on your part. Anyway, I want to drive the point home that regardless of what happens or doesn’t, it is crystal clear to me that we are not going to be romantically involved in any way and no one here is confused about that!

 You don’t need to be cautious because I am not deluded or hung up on you and no one is confused about what is what. I was just very drunk. Anyway, yeah, just putting it out there that regardless of your intention, I feel 

anyway, if you did indeed consent to touching me, I just want to let you know that it’s kind of a 

Hey, so I feel kind of sick about yesterday. I could go into the nuances of why it hurt me (and, actually, they don’t have to do with me still wanting to be with you or anything in that vein) but I guess I’ll just say that, although I don’t strictly remember how we ended up cuddling  am not fully sure how it happened, and that it’s not a big deal and wouldn’t be if it happened again. 

Yo just want to let you know that, although I briefly enjoyed it, I didn’t intend to cuddle you yesterday (and don’t remember exactly how it happened seeing as I was SO. DRUNK.) and it hurt when you acted repulsed towards me/ran away instead of wanting to talk to me or comfort me when I was feeling super fucking horrible both physically and spiritually. Anyway, ofc it’s not a big deal, but I just wanted to let you know that that hurt me and also that there’s no reason to EVER act afraid of me because I do not harbour any latent dreams of pursuing anything romantic w you (and acting as if I do is a power trip ya don’t need to take). Okay? okay. 

Feb 18th, 2017

I’ve come full circle 

My throat feels like I’ve smoked, bacterial tendrils just hinting at exposure, not detectable except by painful proxy

Food is my enemy

I can’t fucking eat

Exactly like, when depressed; when anxious. 

i want to; it would be good for me; it would make me strong; it would be the first step in such a fucking LONG journey of repersonalization and getting my ears and head and neck and heart back 

Of stripping away everything that clogs me, makes me unable to read a sentence on a page without already failing to encode 

Why am I such a brute

WHY AM I SUCH A BRUTE!???

There is so much I want to see and do and be! But I can’t move. Or I don’t. I’m afraid to know what I can’t and what I don’t do bc maybe I really am dull. Maybe I have an aptitude for nothing. Maybe I taste nothing. Maybe my sphere of influence is small and my senses are as dampened as they feel

I am ill right now, yes

But the physical symptoms: an adamant stomach of lead that recoils at the sight of solid food; at the thought of —god forbid— a meal, is a PROUD stomach. It is an anorexic stomach. It is a stomach that restricts for a living; that sustains its own shrinkage, in the way that fat cells and goopy skin and stretch marks could only dream of. 

I am sick. I am so sick. 

I NEED to be sick. This cannot be who I’ve grown up into. 

I used to be a girl who, albeit hyperactive and distracted, COULD read; COULD impress, COULD ace theory exams and math exams and chemistry exams and ANY FUCKING EXAM YOU COULD NAME, and who could balance her life and remember what she did the previous hour

But now i am a girl who self-sabotages even when she doesn’t self-sabotage. do you know what I mean?

There is nothing to sabotage!

I don’t DO anything!

My inner life is a monster. I am sick. I am always always always tired. I don’t know why I’m in school. I don’t know why I’m alive.