HER NEW SONG  BORDERS IS BEAUTIFUL

A MESSAGE THAT HAS LONG BEEN SAID 

-The Main Ingredient (1972)

People talk often about the idea of life changing “in an instant,” “in a flash,” “at first sight,” etc.  It’s not something I put too much stock in; I believe more in gradual change over long periods of time without us consciously realizing what’s happening.  That said, I do remember an instant many years ago in which I knew my life would be forever changed[1].

I worked at the library at Loyola University for the four years I was a student there.  I saw people come and go and crossed paths with nearly everyone on campus at some point.  From my desk, I had a view of the giant glass doors and I could see everyone walking up to the building before they crossed the threshold.  As I saw one person coming into the library, I simultaneously watched her walk into my life, knowing that I wouldn’t be the same thereafter.

Her name was Olivia, she was a cellist, and she needed a copy of a recording of one of Dvořák’s cello concerti[2].  The music library wasn’t my area and I had no idea where to go or what to show her, but I jumped out of my chair and volunteered to help.  I should mention here that I’m not the kind of person who ever volunteers for social interaction with strangers, but for whatever reason, I needed to be around her.  I knew before she even opened the library door that she would break my heart, but I genuinely didn’t care; I had to be in her life in any way she would have me.

She wound up finding what she needed without any help from me, but we talked, introduced ourselves, bonded quickly over being both brown girls and musicians, and I was hooked.  She started coming in more and more, lingering longer at the desk, and we became fast friends.  She gave me her number and we talked on the phone for hours, texted constantly, and eventually hung out outside of the library. 

I knew that what she felt for me was not even on the same plane as what I felt for her, but I couldn’t stop myself.  Being around her quickly became some sort of addiction.  I say “addiction” because it was most certainly self-destructive.  There’s never a positive outcome when one person is head over heels in love with the other while they just say things like, “You’re so funny!  I love hanging out with you!”  Every morning was exciting with the possibility of seeing her and every night was devastating knowing that she would never look at me that way.

 She went back home to Atlanta for the summer and I tried my damnedest to get over it.  We were such good friends and I didn’t want to jeopardize that, so I needed to shut the sappy shit down.  My brother was the only person who knew how I felt about her, so I asked him to help set me straight[3].  He reminded me that all I was doing was hurting myself.  Everything he said was logical and I walked away agreeing with him completely.  Then, she invited me to her house for a few days and logic went flying out of the window.

The entire eight-hour drive, I was asking myself what the hell I was doing.  Why are you spending your gas money on a straight girl?  Pull your head out of your ass and turn around!  Why doesn’t New Orleans have a Waffle house?

I didn’t turn around.  I should’ve turned around.

When I got to her house, she grabbed my bag and showed me to her room.  Of course, there was only one bed and no pull-out/floor option for me.

“Just sleep with me.  It’s no big deal,” she said.

“Yeah, totally.  No biggie,” I responded, although it was a biggie.  A very big biggie.

We had dinner with her family and she took me to a park later that night – one of her favorite places in the city.  The greatest thing about her was that we could hang out all day and all night and never run out of things to say.  I’m such a socially weird person, that something like that is huge for me.  I usually get sick of talking to the same people after a certain number of hours or days, but I never got sick of her.

At the end of my trip, she kissed me goodbye.  It wasn’t a full-on lip kiss, but it definitely wasn’t a cheek situation either.  It was just enough of both to make me scream my head off for the entire drive home.

She texted to see if I made it home okay and I told her that I had.  Then, she sent me something that made me respond out loud with the exact words, “Well, what the fuck is that supposed to mean?!”  It was the first time, but certainly not the last[4].

Liv: I’m really glad you came to see me! J

Mia: Me too! It was fun.

Liv: It was. You make me wonder, but you make me smile even more.

Seriously.  What the fuck is that?

 She came back to New Orleans a few days earlier than she needed to at the end of the summer.  The night she got in, she called me from outside of my house.  I didn’t really understand why she didn’t just go to bed and call me in the morning, but females be crazy, so I just went with it.  We hung out outside, didn’t really talk about anything serious, and then she left.  We got breakfast the next morning.  We could’ve just done the breakfast thing instead of me going outside in my jammies, but again, females be crazy.

That night after dinner[5], she came back to my house.  I don’t remember anything we talked about or what movie we watched because she kissed me.  No more of that half-cheek/half-lip situation, either.  This was a real deal, whole shebang, full monty smackeroo.  That was it: she had me.  Hook, line, and pitiful fish flopping at the end of it.

 The next year was incredible.  I finally understood what all of those love songs were about.  In fact, I wrote entirely too many myself[6], but everything was gravy.  I had my very first girlfriend.  The band was playing regularly, learning all of these new songs, and getting tighter.  School and work were both going well.  Overall, I’m pretty sure my life added up to the definition of “crushing it.”

There was a downside, however, which I completely ignored.  No one knew about our relationship.  Olivia gave me reasons on top of reasons to keep it a secret, all of which I went along with because here was this hot girl who I was totally in love with who actually felt something similar for me.  I wasn’t going to do anything to ruin that.  The concern mostly lay with her friends and family finding out, so slowly, I told my friends and a few family members.  She probably wasn’t cool with it, but I didn’t really give her a say in the matter.  I knew there was no way it would get back to her people and I would lose my mind if I couldn’t at least talk to my brother about how happy I was.  I also wanted her to see that there are wonderful people in the world who love you no matter what and I thought that maybe if she saw that on my side, she’d be more confident on hers.  She wasn’t.

After a few more months of closeted living, I started to snap.  I became convinced that she was cheating on me.  I knew she was very capable of secrets and it wouldn’t have been a stretch for her to extend those secrets to me.  My paranoia only grew the more she told me I was wrong.  If I knew she had study plans with a particular girl we hung out with, I would periodically drive past her apartment to see how long her light stayed on.  She saw me once.  We started to fight more and more, I started to drink more and more, and I knew I was on a slippery slope.  I realized the only way to stop myself was to end our relationship.

I went to her apartment one night and got right to the point.  I told her I wasn’t happy with the person I was becoming and that I felt like I was losing my mind.  I didn’t want to lie anymore.  I didn’t want to feel like I was her dirty little secret.  My entire identity was based on this relationship and I needed time and space to regain sight of myself.

She cried hysterically and without reservation.  I had to get out of there.

“I’ll see you around,” I said.

“What does that mean?” she asked desperately.

“I have to go.  I can’t be around you.”  I went for the door.  She called me back, asked me to stay.  I should’ve kept going, but I told myself that this show of emotion from her was what I really needed to ground myself again.  I wasn’t emotionally alone in the relationship if she could react so fervently.  We could make it over this bump in the road and get back to the good stuff.  If she could cry like that over the possibility of us breaking up, she must have really loved me, and love is all that matters.  I should not have turned around, but I did.  And I stayed.  And everything that happened after that was my own damn fault.

She broke up with me one week later using my own words against me.  She wasn’t happy.  She needed time and space.  She couldn’t be around me.

 The radio silence didn’t last long and after a few weeks, we were talking again.  We were “friends” and everything should have been fine, but it wasn’t.  I was writing some seriously sad songs[7] and she didn’t seem any more okay than I was.  We danced around the idea of getting back together, but I told her that I didn’t want to be a secret anymore.  That did not go over well and, suffice it to say, we did not get back together.

I started dating someone else – a guy who loved me as much as I loved Olivia.  I used that to regain some sort of sense of power.  I felt so small by the end of my relationship with Olivia and here was this other person wanting me, needing me, clinging to me the way I had clung to her.  I needed that validation, that feeling of emotional domination.  I crushed him so that I could feel an inch taller.  I wish I could say that I saw the error of my ways before any real damage was done.  I can’t.  I also wish I could say it was the one and only time I’ve ever treated someone so terribly.  I can’t.

 A year and a half after we first broke up, Olivia and I got back together.  Looking back now, I really can’t say why.  More than anything, I guess I just crumbled under the weight of the feelings that I still had for her.  She still had feelings for me and I took the bait again.  I lost every little bit of strength and resolve I found while we were apart and I went running back to her.

There was another honeymoon phase, but it was much shorter the second time around.  We were now in a long-distance relationship, so everything was put under a microscope.  Without face-to-face contact to make us temporarily forget the annoying things about one another, I began to see things in her that I didn’t like – things I didn’t want in a long-term partner.  We disagreed on more crucial things than we did before.  We fought more.  We no longer fit and I started checking out of the relationship.  She would monopolize phone conversations, which was fine with me because I ran out of things to say to her.  I didn’t respond to her texts with the immediacy that I used to.  I felt the same sense of impending doom as the first time around, but I knew given what happened then, that I would never be the one to end it.  So, I waited.  I waited for months for her break up with me.  I knew it would happen eventually and so I sat through meaningless conversation after meaningless conversation, writing songs about the relationship that we used to have, pretending they were still relevant.

She called herself a “bad girlfriend” all the time.  Maybe she knew.  Maybe she figured out that I wasn’t in love with her anymore and so she decided to cut me loose.  The more likely scenario, though, is that she was just as tired of the charade as I was and so she finally ended it.  I was relieved.  Things fell back into place.  We were friends this time, not “friends.”  We had periods when we didn’t really talk, but there wasn’t any hostility.

She visited one January and we had a really nice time.  There was no tension or discomfort whatsoever.  A few weeks later, I started to pick up on a weird vibe from her.  I couldn’t put my finger on it, so I dropped it.  In May, I asked her if she was in a relationship.  She skirted around the question, instead asking me why I was asking that.  I knew then and there, and she confessed. 

She’d been keeping it from me for months and had no plans to ever say anything about it.  I asked her if she’d planned on saying anything to anyone about it and she said no.  I told her if she cared at all about her new girlfriend, she wouldn’t put her through what she put me through.  It seemed to go in one ear and out the other.  That may be because I was screaming it at the top of my lungs, so incredibly pissed that she’d been lying to me by omission for so long, knowing full well how seriously I took honesty – especially between us.  I was livid.  I threw my phone, punched a wall, and cried and yelled so hard I could barely speak the next day.

My gut reaction was jealousy.  We were together for a year and a half, then broken up for a year and a half, then together again for another year and a half.  Somewhere in the back of my mind, I must have just assumed that we would get back together again – no matter how depressed it made me.  I was so used to the on and off nature of it, that I wasn’t sure what to do with this new information.

I snapped out of that nonsense pretty quickly.  I didn’t want to be with Olivia ever again; I knew that a long time ago.  My brain just went there immediately to allow myself the space to be angry, but that wasn’t why I was angry.  I wasn’t mad because we weren’t getting back together.  I wasn’t mad because she loved someone else.  I was mad because I spent years knowing her more intimately than anyone else ever had, and yet she treated me with no more respect than anyone else in her life.  I was just another person from whom to hide the truth. 

For the duration of our entire relationship, I had her up on a pedestal.  I treated her as though she would break if I said or did something too harshly.  I weighed my words before I spoke so that I was sure I wouldn’t hurt her.  To be fair, she never did anything to make me treat her this way; I just did it.  It started when I was young and naïve and in love and it never went away.  I never wanted to disrespect her or treat her unkindly, so I just went along with what she wanted and took everything she threw at me, good or bad.  Those were the roles that I put us in and I didn’t realize how stupid I’d been until reality bitch-slapped me in the face.  The realization that she didn’t treat me with the same respect or consider my feelings as much as I did hers should not have come as a surprise.  The fact that we’d been in each other’s lives for six years at that point without anyone knowing who I really was to her should’ve been a huge red flag, but I was an idiot.  I knew exactly what I was signing up for when she first kissed me; she was never dishonest about that.  I just didn’t listen.  I was a stupid kid in love.

 I was angry for years after that last conversation with Olivia.  I wrote almost an entire album about it[8].  I didn’t even say her name anymore; I replaced it with curses.  I tore up photos, threw away gifts, and tried everything in my power to eradicate her existence from my life.

It hit me one day that my anger wasn’t completely reserved for her.  I could’ve done without the dishonesty and had just a dash more of respect, but in the end, I knew the kind of person she was and it was my own damn fault for staying in her apartment that night when every fiber of my being said, “go.”

Knowing that in huge part because of my foolishness, I won’t get back the years of my life that followed that night – years that I spent depressed, drinking, crying, hurting people, questioning myself – is a very hard pill to swallow.  I still get mad at myself every once in a while, but for the most part, I have other shit to worry about and happier songs to write.

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[1] What a friggin’ hypocrite.

[2] I just hit y’all with some fancy shit.

[3] Not like that, but kind of.  Not really.  You know what I mean.

[4] Guys: I totally get it.  Ladies: that shit is annoying.

[5] Yes, it was a breakfast-lunch-and-dinner kind of friendship.  As all should be.

[6] See: “Let Me Know,” “U I Adore”

[7] See: “The Very Best Part of Me,” “Love Song,” “Sweet Septembers”

Give It Up For The Good City Of New Orleans

Sunday 19 October 2014. New Orleans Louisiana.

Today was the third and final day of the Crescent City Blues & BBQ festival at Lafayette Square. It was also the last day of my fifth and final music festival. Tomorrow I head back to Australia after almost forty days in the USA pursuing live music, music heritage and culture.

During the now familiar walk to Lafayette Square, I noticed it was a good…