For the last few days I have been obsessively listening to Jeff Buckley's 'Hallelujah'. To say that it is obsessive does not, actually, do justice to the kind of time I spent listening to this song. It was almost a dependent relationship, me and this song, not just this song but the way the song makes me feel. I love the song. I love the lyrics, I love the music, I love the guitar and his voice but mostly, I love the way this song makes me feel. I have seen the video. I know better than to watch the video too many times, because I will quit my job and leave my friends and abandon my children taking only my Ipod and some really good headphones. Possibly battery money, but who knows if I will have the wits by then. The video for this song is amazing. It is very, very good. It is the only time, I think, that I can remember, that I have left a comment on something that I was not intimately familiar with. In the video you can see his mouth moving as he sings, and his hands as he plays, and it feels like he really means the things that he is making you feel. It is a love song, you know, but not really. It is a song about pain and loss and the aching of the thing that you cannot have and the destruction of getting what you wish for. It's good. You've heard it, cause it's on Shrek, but you have not heard it for real until you have heard Jeff Buckley sing it.

Listening to this man sing this song, it makes me realize something. Number one, that the universe is a fucked up place. Jeff Buckley, oh my goodness. Number one and a half is that she was right when she said that people will forget what you said, and they will forget what you did, but they will never forget the way you made them feel. I appreciate anything that can make me feel. Feel what, who cares, just feel. I was ready to high five a chart today because it broke my heart and made me want to kill myself. I had a new and healthy respect for my co-worker the other day because he made me angrier than I can remember being in recent history. I am in love with this boy and every day that he goes his way and I go mine I appreciate that he can inspire the kind of feeling that I feel, all the time, not just for him but for me, at the thought of him. To feel, you know? The highs and the lows and the sideways times when you are crying out of anger or laughing in horror or clinging in desperation, but no matter what you're doing, you're doing it on purpose.

I want to not forget to do things on purpose. I want to cry for that mother and tell that one guy that he is wrong and I want to take Matthew and almost, almost kiss him. I want my children to know that our life was not an accident and I want to hear that song and be twenty pounds heavier in the heart but fifty pounds lighter in the head. I want all these things, and it's easy enough to have them. I just have to pay more attention.

do you know how I feel

cause I don't think you know how I feel


You know how sometimes when you are standing on something tall, a bridge, say, or a dam? You are standing up there and suddenly you become afraid of things that you are not normally afraid of. My keys. Where are my keys? What if I drop my keys? Where is my phone? Am I too close? Because even though I am a good three feet from the edge, I am afraid that somehow maybe my knees will buckle and I will go over, even though my knees have never gone out from under me with no warning before. Or you feel that compulsion to step off. You don't know why, you just feel it, even though you know it will kill you. My favorite part about that is that sometimes I wonder if I have actually done it and I just don't know it yet. That maybe, even though I am standing there safely, I am actually two seconds ahead of myself and my brain will catch up soon. It is an odd feeling.

This is how I feel when I am with you. When I see you. When I hear you talk or even just, sometimes, when I see your handwriting. Your initials are everywhere. I see you, everywhere. But when I am with you, when I'm standing right in front of you, sometimes I feel that way. I have to ask myself if I am in fact still standing in front of you or has it happened? Are you still speaking or do I, do I, perhaps, already know the weight of your throat? Because sometimes it is so real, it feels like it has happened and that it's already done, even though I know it hasn't. Because when I'm with you it is always right, it's always true, and I believe it. I believe it the way I believe in the sun, the way I believe in my legs, and this is how I recognize you, because you are the smell of water, you are the sound of my own name, and this is how you move me. You are different than I am, but you are the things that I know. You're tall and I am not. You're thin and I am not. You're a lot of things that I am not but you sing when I sing, I see you seeing and I want you, I don't want all of you but enough to make you recognize and acknowledge, I want your limbs to remember me, I want to know that you know and I want to hold your face and see your tattoos against my plain, plain skin. But I will never tell you, because you are a test. I will never tell you because where you are the sun I am the ocean, and the ocean does not speak to the sun. It takes its heat and reflects its light but it does not touch it, ever. Not even on the horizon, where it looks and feels like the most natural thing in the world, and if the sun were to crash into the ocean it would be the end of everything. You're a test. The universe put you in my way to test me, to see if I could accept a gift of something good without destroying it. And I can. And I will. It will be my gift back to the world, and to you, and to me. My gift to you is to never make you responsible for knowledge you did not ask for, and then I will never have to not feel this way. And that will be my gift to myself.