Come Home

If you want to make me fall in love with you, show me good music. If you want me to love you, sing with me. If you want me to be yours, make music with me.

                I once had a conversation with someone about the idea of organic music. The laughter of children. The wind blowing leaves. The way you feel when you smell a fire. The crackling of leaves. The skipping of a rock. I once made her cry in the car. I was singing along to the song Wading In Deeper by Katzenjammer. That was a prime example of organic music. I wanted her to hear the song; I sang out with everything that song made me feel.                    

      

                 I don’t feel like I’m living to my fullest potential when I’m not singing. Tonight at work some guy drove by in his big “I’m compensating for something” truck. He was playing that song “Baby, lock the door and turn the lights down low...” I don’t feel like using the internet to look up the song. I sang the rest that verse in the parking lot. Noah, my coworker was out there smoking a cigarette with me, I wasn’t singing to him. He was just there. I felt better just singing. Its like I breathe in all the time, but the only time I ever truly, completely, exhale is when I sing.

                I have moments, moments when a normal person would want to cry, or smile, or laugh. I want to sing, I want to dance. I want to spin, round and round, until I’m dizzy and breathless. Just to feel something because no words I could ever come up with would describe the way I’m feeling. No ordinary gesture could express my happiness, or my sorrow.

                 I’m having an emo night. I’m sitting alone in my room listening to Ryan Adams. There are people in my living room laughing and enjoying each other’s company. I am satisfied just listening. I don’t want them to share it with me, I want them to keep it for themselves and let me sulk in my room. I missed all of the fireworks tonight. Its probably for the best, I would’ve thought too much about past years. Independence Days gone by, holding hands and swimming and singing with families that weren’t mine. Sitting on blankets, playing with cousins who aren’t involved with my family anymore. Talking to cousins who have grown up just like me.  Sitting on the ground in Okmulgee, before my parents got divorced, seeing the copper colored sparks and saying “pennies”, I believed money was falling from the sky. Holidays lose their magic when you get older. The booms of firecrackers make you nervous instead of filling you with awe and wonder. Its so bittersweet. The colors are still just as wondrous, but the fire trucks that continuously pass by make you weary. That was someone’s house, or someone’s yard, or someone’s thumb, or someone’s eyebrows.

                All I wanted to do was to sit on a tailgate or a porch or in a yard. Let the deep low booms fill in as the bass line of the evening. The sips of beer act as the descant. Chirps of crickets and the drone of conversations I’m not involved in carry on as an endless melody.

Come Home by Ryan Adams