Too good for me

I wrote a song once, that I still perform with the band quite regularly, that still to this day recalls memories and feelings so clear I could still be in the situation I was writing about in the first place.   

The train ride to your house is nothing new

I've ridden these rails a thousand times before 

But when you meet me at the station, do I kiss you hello?

Still trying to decide, your hand cups the side of my face - 

and it just feels right. 

I like those lyrics because they are so teenage, so obvious, so non-poetic and so descriptive and terribly wordy. They describe a stupid awkward situation that I pieced together from things that were happening to me and the gawkiness of the whole scenario was a filter for everything I was writing at the time. 


For the record the whole scenario ended ho-humedly, I guess - petering out into nothing like these hormonally-charged things tend to do. I remember crying angry tears and throwing books and tearing pages in my diary from writing so hard with a broken biro - all the normal things that we do when things don't go as we'd hoped they would. Then I remember calming down and sitting down and writing this song; a weird summary of everything about myself that I hated, and turning them all over and under microscopes and lights and aggravating them all, thinking how if I could make everything as bad as it could possibly be, nothing could be worse. I remember how liberating it was to trawl through everything I'd done wrong in this strange situation, analyse it, accept it for what it was and turn it into a cute little song. In the end I discovered that I'm not as smart as I thought I was, and that sometimes people are just too smart for other people...but the main thing is it doesn't ACTUALLY matter that much when you're 18 years old. Learning, yes!


Since then that's kind of how I like to look at things. If it hurts, it can be carefully sewed into something pretty, and if it's beautiful already, there's not much else to be done, just put it in a nice frame or something. 


But yeah. I said this to the band the other day, about how those feelings really do just bubble underneath the surface like lava when we play that song - but it's a good thing, really. Really! To be able to recall those monumental feelings that gave the song life to begin with is sorta healthy, I think. Healthy and honest and just kind of nice.