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Hell, If It's Over...

7 · Nov · 2002

For the last seven days the same song was in my head. It didn’t matter that I saw a total of ten live performances in six days. The same lyric hung in my ears as if it were continually being broadcast over an elevator speaker. It was Matchbox 20’s “Rest Stop”

“While you were sleeping

I was listening to the radio and wonderin’ what you’re dreamin’

When it came to mind that I just didn’t care.

And I thought

hell, if it’s over, well I had better end it now before I lose my nerve

Are you listening? Can you hear me? “

I don’t know who I would sing this song about. No one in particular comes to mind. But there it was, falling softly from my lips at every pause, every lull in conversation.

Meanwhile, thanks to some stored up frequent flyer miles; I left Nashville last Friday to visit my friends Erin and Mike in Burbank. This trip was my opportunity to investigate California once again and reassure myself that Nashville is better for someone like me. (whatever that means) I went there with the expectation that I could enjoy a bit more sun, rejuvenate myself by taking in the ocean, and lay the “what about LA?” question to rest.

Instead of feeling griped with anxiety at the sight of the jammed freeways and surgically enhanced egos, I found myself wishing I had made the trip sooner.

So it really threw me that the above lines were stuck in my head during this trip instead of something more suitable like Sheryl Crow’s “Soak up the Sun.” Even when I saw her convince a mall crowd from a stage on Sunday I still ended the day with the nagging lines from Rest Stop lodged in my mind.

At the same time, something else peculiar was happening. My cell phone wasn’t ringing. I probably wouldn’t have noticed it as much if it weren’t for the fact that Erin’s phone was ringing every ten minutes. Bad reception, I guessed. But by Monday night I figured it out. No one was calling. And in a half joking, mostly deflated way I sang these words to myself.


“While you were sleeping
I was listening to the radio and wonderin’ what you’re dreamin’
When it came to mind that you just don’t care.
And I thought
hell, if it’s over, well I had better end it now before I lose my nerve
Are you listening? Can you hear me? “

It was about no one in particular. Just me.

I’m not very good about knowing when to walk away sometimes. I would have every relationship, every friendship last until the end of time. I would watch it suffocate in my hands before I would let it go, because I could never trust that something good would choose to leave and return to me. But at this moment, I’m thinking about a lot of my friends in Nashville and the dreams I had when I first arrived here in 1995 and I am seeing that I have pushed enough. The friendships have evolved and the dreams and plans have rearranged themselves. Both are starting to suffocate.

Right before I left for LA, someone reminded me that the words to a song don’t have to rhyme. I had just been quoting one of my songs to him and though he hadn’t meant to hurt me, this little tidbit was like a thorn in my side. I have said before that all of our relationships, however beautiful, are at the mercy of our ability to communicate. “Are you listening? Can you hear me?” What I have been trying to communicate to my friends and family the last six months has not been getting through. For whatever reason, I’m more misunderstood now than I ever was and some of you are even worried. The words don’t rhyme. They never did. Never will. And you have to trust me when I say it’s alright.

I put myself out here and I do it by choice. It’s not all narcissistic and angry. It’s about not giving up the search for the highest truth, even if it means exposing the ugliness of us, of me. I’m not a brilliant writer. I’m not even a brilliant person. But there’s no way I’m giving up, giving in or selling out. See, I’m okay with taking the fall, but I’m not okay with taking a fall for nothing.

Again, thank you for sticking with me. I hope you enjoy my latest poem below.

Oh

The beauty

is

chaos.

Posted by Penny Rene at November 7, 2002 02:45 PM

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