I Get Restless

 This won't be a long post, because it's 10:23 and I'm very tired already, and I desperately want to brush my teeth, which isn't usually something I feel so strongly. Or who knows, maybe it will be long.  Anything goes at 10:23. I looked at mine and LotN's old messages tonight.  The ones he told me I should if I wanted to understand, but that I couldn't bring myself to at the time. It was an interesting experience.  I was able to relive those feelings, but at a distance, under the tempering of a little time.  It started not too unpleasantly.  My main goal was to understand more fully what I had done wrong.  The answer was more complicated than I was expecting. I hadn't done much wrong at first.  In fact, I initially found myself more frustrated with myself for how hard I was on myself than anything else.  Then things started to shift. I couldn't put my finger on how, but I felt the transition from vulnerable to uncomfortable in how I spoke....

 It's too early to know. It's almost over, I'm almost home, and I still don't know how it ends.   What's changed?  How am I different? Things have been different the last two weeks, but that's nothing if it doesn't have a lasting impact.   Right now I don't know.  I just trust and pray. It's the last night.  Here goes.

  Era: road trip I wrote this yesterday in the bed of my truck.  I've been trying and trying to turn the little song fragments in my head into a whole work, and this was the first time I succeeded so far.   It's certainly not perfect.  It tries to say a lot, and I think that diminishes anything it doesn't say.  As with all my songs, the goal is to capture a feeling, a moment, or a perspective as truly as I can, but there are more sides to everything. The process of moving on is not an easy one, and not one that I want to take lightly.  I've had to be intentional in not allowing any bitterness to grow, in trying to be as accurate as possible in my recollections of the past, and to look at myself and my future in a way that's God-honoring and not melodramatic.  I knew that no matter what I did, I didn't want to move on improperly.  The wound needed to be cleaned and stitched in a straight line, not simply have a bandage slapped on it so I didn'...

  Era: post-LotN Of all the songs I'm posting tonight, this is the most imperfect.  It's overly long, has no chorus to speak of, and contradicts its own structure at least once.  But it also might be the most perfect representation of my feelings immediately following the breakup, and best sums up the story from beginning to end. I actually wrote the song the day after we broke up, not the day of like it says; still too soon for me to have developed the regret that showed itself in Why I Let Him Go, only a deep sadness and feeling of loss. Things turned quickly, and in One Month I tried to put into words all the things that were lost overnight.  I failed, unfortunately.   More was lost than I can explain in two and a half minutes.

  Era: post-LotN I wrote this song about a week after we broke up, and the only line that isn't true is in the second verse.  The chorus is one side of a multifaceted story, but largely accurate. If I had more time, I would probably rewrite the second verse a little bit, but I do really like the bridge.

  Era: pre-LotN Look, it's not the pain that keeps on drawing me away from what I love. There's things haunting all of us Whether from below or from above. I recorded those lines late one night, weeks before I ever thought of LotN as a possibility.  Shortly (very shortly) after he and I started talking, I sat down one day and turned it into what you hear up there.  Wolves is the only song I'm posting tonight that isn't strictly auto-biographical.  While some of the lines certainly describe how I've felt from time to time, the whole song describes someone much less inclined to settle down than I am.

  Era: post-Ferdinand Hypocrite was written at a time when I was still disgusted with myself, and I think that comes across pretty well.  More than that though, I was done.  I didn't trust myself with relationships anymore, so I had basically decided that I never needed to be in one again.  I changed my stance after I had some time to recover, which is funny considering what later happened with LotN. The relationships had very different outcomes, however.  LotN left me feeling imperfect, but capable of improvement and, eventually, a solid, happy relationship.  And I'd say that's a solid step forward. And yes, I realize that I have a hair hanging off of my pants in the video.  I didn't watch it until I had left the park.