5pm_weds | seventy-seven. (Reply)

Mineshaft II
Artist: Dessa
Album: A Badly Broken Code
Year: 2010
♥: I have never been much good at receiving sympathy, advice, or help -- and I am even worse at asking for it.

But one July night, two years ago, I was lying in a churchyard at 2am, drunk, staring at the sky, feeling my first adult breakdown. My time as an undergrad was finished. My friends were all pairing up, moving in together. Summer was past its midpoint and it was time to start making some real decisions and I was unbelievably ill-equipped. I felt desolate. Alone. I could barely find the will to stand up, but somehow -- for the first time in my life -- I found a place in me to call out for someone.

A text message: "Awake?"
And your reply: "Awake!"

I remember that night not for what was said, but for the fact that you got out of bed at 2:30 in the morning and we ate bagels on the street, my makeup running as I fought tears, you in your glasses (which I don't think I'd seen before then, and may be why I have such fond feelings for them now). Thinking of that night, for months afterwards, made me tear up. I couldn't understand why you had come out to comfort me, and I felt humiliated for crying in front of you, but something deeper -- something fundamental -- tried to push me towards believing that it was okay. That I'd found someone who both understood, and who I could depend on. And that was what brought the tears: that maybe there was someone there for me, really.

You've already been here before / you already know where it goes
Two years later, for very different reasons (but probably thanks to an equal amount of alcohol), on Monday night, I cried in front of you again. And since then I have been feeling those familiar defensive urges to shut down, close up -- as I do whenever I become vulnerable. I read too much into things, convince myself that it would be easier to forget the whole issue and just be alone. But something new, this time around: while I am still this side of humiliated and anxious,
I very genuinely don't want to forget and be alone.
The defense mechanism won't work.
I want to trust you.

You may remember this song from a Facebook message I sent you in mid-July, 2010. I sent it to you at a time when we were both a bit touch and go, when the comfort of knowing someone was on the other end of a 3am text message mattered -- a lot. Then, I said that this song was "perfect late-night-trauma accompaniment." And it was, that night in a churchyard in July.

Now -- posted despite there being several other, new & fresh, songs I wanted share with you -- it is still raw. Still one of the most beautiful and honest songs I have ever heard. I still remember listening to Dessa perform it live at the Jazz Fest, my hands clenched together and my mouth hanging open, my heart in my feet and above my head simultaneously. It is still in my Top 15 songs, maybe even Top 10; the last verse still strikes every individualistic fibre in me.
But what it is tonight, in all the honesty and brilliant lyrics and viscera, is a memory of a time when I let someone in. Traumatic, yes -- a heart opened up "right there on a napkin on the carpet" -- but after trauma, sometimes, you can heal.