…sometimes, I need a time-out, too.

Taking a page from old-school Miss, today you get esoteric lyric elucidation. No one should be surprised by the artist. Seriously. If you are, you don’t know me at all.

Plane by Jason Mraz

Drain the veins in my head
Clean out the reds in my eyes to get by security lines
Dear x-ray machine
Pretend you don’t know me so well
I wont tell if you lied
Cry, cause the droughts been brought up
Drinkin’ cause you’re lookin so good in your starbucks cup
I complain for the company that I keep
The windows for sleeping rearrange
And I’m nobody
Well who’s laughing now

I have to vacate my thoughts of you. Two sentences was all it took for me to backstep into possibility and since the silence has been deafening, leaving me standing alone. I can’t let myself get caught up again, so I’m so affected, dry eyes are an impossibility. I’ve travelled this road so much, I know its back country, road signs and the place to sit and think for too long, getting sunburnt in the process. I’m in a dry, arrid country, and you don’t have a passport or a sleeping bag to curl up next to me and protect me from the poisonous things that scurry in the dark. Once again, here I lie alone, seeing phantom scorpions, when really I know that I’m the frightening, metasoma-wielding apparition to them.

I’m leaving your town again
And I’m over the ground that you’ve been spinning
And I’m up in the air said baby hell yeah
Well honey I can see your house from here
If the plane goes down, damn
I’ll remember where the love was found
If the plane goes down, damn

So I’m taking off from this spot. I’m choosing to board again, walking through the channel with determination that I’m on a one-way course. All it took was those two sentences, and you wove a reality in the blink of my eyes. But I can see, a few blinks later, that this mirage isn’t the truth of my existence. But that doesn’t mean that I’m flying unfettered or without pause for how we got here and why I’m leaving again. And that doesn’t mean that this isn’t bittersweet, this Neverneverland that I must pan my way out of.  If I crash along the way, and sidestep once again, well then that seems approporiate, given the frequent flyer miles my soul’s been racked with.

Damn, I should be so lucky
Even only 24 hours under your touch
You know I need you so much
I cannot wait to call you
And tell you that I landed somewhere
And hand you a square of the airport
And walk you through the maze of the map
That I’m gazing at
Gracefully unnamed and feeling guilty for the luck
And the look that you gave me
You make me somebody
Ain’t nobody knows me
Not even me can see it, yet I bet I’m

You were the person who got my everything and it’s bruising me that you’re missing out on so much growth and invention. I don’t have that, now, the sight of you laughing at my overenthusiasm as you remove the candy from my hands and emit your own kind of fantasy into mine. As hard as it’s been lately, I hurt so hard that I can’t share it with you as the fire dies down, so that you can see that the burns are only the first-degree kind. Once you strip off the dead skin, it’s fresh and new underneath. Some moments, I just need to exfoliate you from my mind; some days, I wish you could see the baby-smooth that’s been borne of this unintended coercion you’ve masterminded. You would appreciate it most, while you were loathe to watch it unfold. You would be most caught up with it all, even as you ran away, frightened.

I’m leaving your town again love
But I’m over the ground that you’ve been spinning
And I’m up in the air, said baby hell yeah
Oh honey I can see your house from here
If the plane goes down, damn
I’ll remember where the love was found
If the plane goes down, damn

But I know you too well, even if I expect you too well, too. I can trust in a Jekyll and Hyde at the same time, happy when the monster’s caged and sadly expectant when he emerges. I know the constant backtrack of your feet, the mental mambo you do between self and other, well and sick, rich with love and alone in silence. The topography of your heartbreak is one you’re largely creating, with every ONE-two-three-cha-cha-cha, and whether I’m suffocated by your spaghetti arms or not is entirely up to this baby. I can see the dance floor we’ve glided over os many times, and I can smile at the spot where I stepped on your toes, and we both rotated at the precise wrong moment, nearly making our brains live in each other’s homes. But I can’t sway with you anymore.

You keep me high minded
You get me high

I thought, convinced myself that it was merely your obtuse transparent infatuation and your addiction to me that kept me casting off your galley. But every time I moored, I was more seasick than the last, and every time I raised the sail again, I became less the captain and more the crew. Sailing with you meant climbing the mast, seeing stormy weather ahead and hoping it wasn’t the perfect storm, yet thrilling in the waves as they crashed around, even as I wondered when I’d go overboard and never reach the surface again. I miss the ride sometimes, but I’m thankful that I own a life jacket at this moment.

Flax seeds, well they tear me open
And supposedly you can crawl right through me
Taste these teeth please
And undress me from these sweaters better hurry
Cause I’m keeping upward bound now
Oh maybe I’ll build my house on your cloud
Here I’m tumbling for you
Stumbling through the work that I have to do
Don’t mean to harm you

It’s broken you a little more with every goodbye we’ve spoken or left unsaid. This one was entirely mine, you didn’t even know that I was leaving. And even if I could blame you for it, I won’t, for the fact of the matter is, you’ve opened more than you’ve jigsawed. If you were to become a traveller again, I don’t know what I could do, but invite you as quickly as I could, before the vacation ended. But right now, the creation of me isn’t allowing visitors of your stature, even if your build is exactly what I crave to sweat less.

Who do you
Think you are, are, are, are
To keep me so oh cold, cold
You keep me high minded
You keep me high minded

With so much condemnation possible, I still have to think of what you’ve made me, and who, and how all of these are good made out of destination. I should shout silently that you’ve wrecked the very epitome that existed, or I could claim full guilt for that myself, but instead, I’ll hold onto the positivity that I can, and find gratitude that you helped make me strong, even if it was accidentally, while you wished my spiritual demise.

The square of which is 12. If you divide it by seven, as in days of the week, you get 20.57. 20 weeks and four days since more than a sip.

It’s not getting easier, I’ll be honest. Everything is a trigger, this past week. Every meal we eat out, the drink menu calls me. The really big temper tantrums make me want to take a little walk to the store where all of the bottles line up so perfectly. Having money in my bank account is a reason to celebrate, right?

Celebrate. I almost bought I condo when I was 20. I had the down-payment in my chequing account, and I started to celebrate a little too early – before even applying for a mortgage or making an offer. Soon, two months were up, the entire deposit had been drank and I was broke, unable to even pay rent. I had to move back in with my father. I’d quit my three jobs, dropped out of school and started drinking from wake (and bake) to bed.

Now, I have my bills paid and more work than I can delve mentally into while living within the strict confines of my newly-adopted robot-like schedule, and there’s still money in the bank and I’ve forced myself to spend some of it, because, quite frankly:

if it’s there, I could drink it.

I’ve made this commitment to myself, to her. So I won’t. Really. No, I won’t. I can’t. I shouldn’t. I mean…maybe, nope. Won’t.

This is the dialogue that hits my brain 12-37 times a day, during times of peace, strife, waking, and lying while waiting for sleep. While I’m balancing my budget and checking my email. While I sit down to order a vegetarian wrap after being told that caesars are on special. While I’m making dinner or washing dishes or folding laundry or typing minuscule words like this.

I quit drinking because I thought that if I wanted to drink at some point, nearly every day, then I probably had a problem in there somewhere. It wasn’t until I quit that I knew I had a problem in there. Quitting has been the most relevant factor in my thirst.

This is already going around in circles, and not really doing much except to overwhelmingly, verbosely state the obvious: this is getting harder.