Call you up in the middle of the night Like a firefly without a light You were there like a blowtorch burning I was a key that could use a little turning
So tired that I couldn't even sleep So many secrets I couldn't keep Promised myself I wouldn't weep One more promise I couldn't keep
It seems no one can help me now I'm in too deep there's no way out This time I have really led myself astray
Runaway train, never going back Wrong way on a one-way track Seems like I should be getting somewhere Somehow I'm neither here nor there
Can you help me remember how to smile? Make it somehow all seem worthwhile How on earth did I get so jaded? Life's mystery seems so faded
I can go where no one else can go I know what no one else knows Here I am just a-drownin' in the rain With a ticket for a runaway train
And everything seems cut and dried Day and night, earth and sky Somehow I just don't believe it
Runaway train, never going back Wrong way on a one-way track Seems like I should be getting somewhere Somehow I'm neither here nor there Bought a ticket for a runaway train Like a madman laughing at the rain A little out of touch, a little insane It's just easier than dealing with the pain
Runaway train, never going back Wrong way on a one-way track Seems like I should be getting somewhere Somehow I'm neither here nor there
Runaway train, never coming back Runaway train, tearing up the track Runaway train, burning in my veins
I follow the night Can't stand the light. When will I begin To live again?
One day I'll fly away Leave all this to yesterday What more will your love do for me? When will love be through with me?
Why live life from dream to dream? And dread the day when dreaming ends.
One day I'll fly away leave all this to yesterday Why live life from dream to dream And dread the day when dreaming ends. One day I'll fly away Fly Fly Away
Sometimes song lyrics filter into our awareness and hook into something that we feel or think. I guess I'm not alone in this experience as I know it's something that has, in itself, been sung about in the "strumming my pain with his fingers" song... Y'know the one... (Frustratingly, I can only think of The Fugees - with their irritating 'one time' spin on it- though I first knew the original version by __________fill in the blank_____). THAT song tells of someone's shock and disbelief at hearing a young boy singing their "whole life with his words". The narrator (do songs HAVE narrators?) feels that his or her secret pain has been exposed, as though the boy has opened up her letters and "read each one aloud". Interesting that the song expresses a sense of the agony that can come from being 'known' in an intimate way, of being revealed. The narrator prays that the boy will finish, suggesting that it is absolutely unbearable. I wonder if the agony was in being known or in being faced with his/her own pain. Perhaps a mixture.
I digress. I actually wanted to write about the very opposite reaction to the one I've just discussed.
I wasn't listening to the radio I had on as I was driving today but somehow the words of a song I've never heard, pushed their way into my head. As lyrics sometimes do (and despite the fact I'm not completely sold on the song as a whole) they made something in me feel a little bit heard and understood and realised. It's odd how a part of you can suddenly and unexpectedly be given a voice through a medium which has no knowledge of your existence, let alone experience. I guess it's a testimony to the human condition and to the fact that in ways we don't necessarily ever get to experience wholly, we are never quite alone.
Praying won't do it Hating won't do it Drinking won't do it Fighting won't knock you out Of my head
Hiding won't hide it Smiling won't hide it Like I ain't tried it Everyone's tried it now And failed somehow
So when you gonna let me When you gonna let me out - Out
And if you know How do you get up from an all time low I'm in pieces Seems like peace is The only thing I'll never know How do you get up Get up
‘Cos driving won't do it Flying won't do it Denying won't do it Crying won't drown it out
Not really a song of hope or anything, but there may be something ever so slightly comforting in hearing another pose the questions that you have so often asked in the dead of night.
Dissociation, like depression, has a wardrobe full of different outfits.
It can appear smoothly, draped in a fine mist of white muslin, allowing a hazy, overexposed world to blur before your eyes.
Other times it can rock up dressed in an altogether more jazzy little number, a more textured material with large purpley grey blotches which grow and intensify as you look at them.
Occasionally it can make quite a dramatic entrance wearing a dark, kaleidoscopic cloak which wraps around the edges of your eyes, warping distance, making things zoom in and out. Making the world a computer game. Those cars racing you... they're not real... Nothing is really real.
Sometimes dissociation involves sound... an indistinct blurring of a voice with the silence of the space it falls into... The words take a sudden dive before they reach your ears... Sometimes the letter blends that make up the words don't even get to you in the right order. Syllables stretch into each other, yawning languidly into each others' beginnings and endings and beginnings until there are no gaps in sound, just distant, fluctuating tones.
And then there are things that I fail to understand.
I ALWAYS thought I had an atrocious memory. I remember so very little about being young. Whole trips, events, months, years don't exist in my mind. Somewhere in me lies a terror filled conviction that I am in the early stages of Alzheimer's... Early onset... It seems an inescapable fate, given that it's both my long and short term memory that is an issue.
I often run upstairs to get something and by the time I'm up there, it's gone... I have conversations and stop mid sentence, unable to complete what I've been saying.
I go to ask my boss something, tap on the door, say hello and then.... then nothing. (And NO, I'm not anxious around my boss. We're good friends).
Recently, my family recalled a trip to a cousin's christening. We'd stayed the night before in a pub and I had apparently become hysterical with fear upon entering the place. Something about some drunk men in the bar...
"You must remember! You were about eleven! I was only six and I remember it!"
The nerves in my leg have all gone dead and though I watch the skin dent under their fingertips, I can't feel them pressing down on it.
That's what listening to stories of my childhood is sometimes like.
According to the woman, and to others who seem to know, my memory loss is dissociation. It's indicative of 'something'. It 'says a lot'. Really? I can't believe this. It's sounding too strange and I know, after all, that I just have a terrible memory compared to my sisters.
But I don't remember a lot of sessions either. Whole therapy sessions aren't there the next day. Someone pointed out that I pay too much to be forgetting everything. Hence my new resolve to write, despite resistance.
This post is too long but I wanted to include a song by a man I'm sure I could love (if only for his voice).
It's called In My Head and it's a question that tortures me.
Something sometimes happens in therapy where I find myself asking if anything I feel really exists... I suddenly doubt that the pain and the desperation is real... I doubt that I am even telling he truth... I don't know whether anything I feel exists in reality. I beg the woman to consider that I might be making it up... that it might all be in my head. I don't want to waste her time. I don't want her to believe me if my feelings aren't even real.
And it's been a long December and there's reason to believe Maybe this year will be better than the last
These words were going round my head as I stopped the car to take this picture on the eve of the new year. The countryside was breathtaking as the rays of the winter sunset sliced through sharp trees to spike the cold, crisp grasses.
I wanted to thank everyone reading for the kindness and support you have given so patiently since I dipped my toe into the blog pond. You guys rock.
For each and every one of you, I hope that this year is better than the last. x
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