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.