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August 7, 2005
OGIC: Hunger artists
Mitchissmo has such a good and evocative post on break-ups (via Manhattan Transfer, thanks kindly), it almost makes you long for one. Sure, they make you feel flayed alive and stabbed through the heart, but at least they make you unmistakably feel...still, emphasis on the almost.Break ups fascinate me. Break ups are like one of those hallways from a 1980s music video: a black and white tunnel in slanted perspective, full of misshapen closed doors, a red ball bouncing away into the distance. Despite the obvious clichéd meanings you know surround you, everything still feels heavy and of great import. It all means something, man.
Don't get me wrong; I despise break ups. In fact, as time goes on I can barely bring myself to the first date in fear of the last one.
Yep. And Allison Moorer has a thoroughly devastating song about just this on Miss Fortune: "Mark My Word." The lyrics don't seem like much on their own, but when she sings it, it'll kill you. The speaker is at the outset of a relationship she wants, and all she can feel is preemptive sorrow and even bitterness. Helplessly and certainly, she's killing the affair before it can find its legs. I always thought of that speaker as simply battered into tragic fatalism, but Mitchissmo's post makes me think she may be harboring a masochistic fascination--one that even the best optimists among us can surely relate to in some corner of our wounded souls.
Back to Mitchissmo:
As we get older our break ups get more intense precisely because life has shown us that goodbyes are often of a certain permanence. There is no going back, no matter what one's intentions are. Of course, break ups are not deaths, but they are deaths of a kind. They are emotional goodbyes, ones that we often try to control in a variety of outlandish ways: sending near funereal bouquets of flowers, crafting the most poetic or well structured email or, better yet, drafting an analog letter so well put and fail-safe it rivals a legal brief. Such actions aim to redirect the sinking ship to new, safe waters. However--and not that I know anything about this--with every effort, it may even push fate along. All of this is why break ups are a good source of comedy and death is, well, not so much. Man and his efforts to defeat Fate is always funny.
The end of a relationship hurts like nothing else because, among other reasons, the object of desire is still out there (alive!). Ah yes, the slow turning from something here to something there, from something present to something past, and the gut wrenching feeling of knowing that it's happening. That door in the slanted hallway is slamming, and don't count on it opening again, buddy boy.
So good it hurts. (And I have totally written that letter. It was masterful.)
Posted August 7, 2005 7:45 AM
