This is my first Chicago Halloween that didn't didn't make a massive kerplunk sound. I should be writing claims and subclaims for my exploration of Lynch's auteur style in Twin Peaks, but I owe you and myself a check-in. Hello - how have you been? How fucking great was The Walking Dead tonight? SO GREAT. Really scary, and really well-shot. I would be worried about the sustainability, but since I hear the comics give lots of rich source material, I'm less concerned. Also - way to cut off the end of Dawn of the Dead, AMC. Dorks.
Today I'm talking about Halloween and music, and memory. It's a Halloween post, but not really.
It was party time at the residence last night. Alyssa seriously was the best costume - a giant pot leaf - but Grace as Misty from Pokemon was pretty legit as well. We had about thirty people show up, and after a lot of whiskey apple cider and much due revelry, the stragglers started to abandon ship. Ben was the first one to get here, before we were even dressed, because he was working early and leaving early. Well, guess who was the last one sitting on my couch at three in the morning. Predictable unpredictability. Look who magically got their shift changed.
We were always trading music, giving songs to each other, sharing what we loved. He gave me Neutral Milk Hotel, Animal Collective, My Bloody Valentine, etc. - I gave him Pixies, The Cure, Neil Young. And there he was again, stealing Horses and other things off of iTunes. We listened to Meadowlands by the Wrens, then Monsters of Folk, then Since I Left You by the Avalanches. I'd never heard the first and the third albums, and now their mine.
Last night solidified something for me. "The Right Place" by Monsters of Folk came on and I really listened to the lyrics, and thought about this boy in my bed. This boy who I loved so my freshman year, the answer to my everything...and how different I felt. I'll always love him a little bit, but something about that song made me realize that I'm in the right place. I watched him sleep this morning, and nothing about him made me want to leap into his arms, proclaim my love, worship him. He's just a boy, imperfect and perfect just like everyone else. I'm so far away from the person I was two Halloweens ago, when we got busted smoking pot in his dorm room I can't believe it. We've moved into a comfortable place where it isn't just awkward glances at parties any more, but it isn't doing our grocery shopping together either. It's the right place.
Yes, I know sleeping with my ex-boyfriend is probably not the smartest choice I could be making, but it's my choice. I keep getting warned about falling back in love, how it always get messy, but listening to that song, watching him sleep, I realized it might get messy and it might not, but for that moment, I was in the right place. My roommates made me feel pretty shitty about it this morning, well one did, who said I "should work out another arrangement," but she made me realize too that her maturity just isn't in the same place as mine, and there's nothing wrong with that.
Maybe it's meditation with yoga, but I'm in this really clear headspace where I'm finding that things will happen, and we can make them happen or not, but mostly they just happen to us. And most of them aren't worth freaking out about. It isn't worth worrying about your roommate's arrangement or whether you just missed the goddamn train. Just let it go, let it sink into the floor with savasana, the corpse pose for meditation, and breathe. People will come into your life and go out of it, so why not appreciate them while they're around? Why does it all have to mean something greater? Just enjoy the moments you have.
Halloween has been a major holiday for me since I realized it was a holiday - I enjoy it more than Christmas - and there's always been a pull and a power to this time of fall for me. Maybe that's just the hippie bullshit head trip I'm on right now, but damnit, I'm on it, and I'm in the right place.
There will be boys and songs and parties and Halloweens yet to come. The past is past, and what comes is better than what came before. All I do is smile in this moment about the fucking horrendous paper I still have to write because it's just a paper I won't remember six months from now. But what I will remember are the songs, the music, and the comfort of Ben's arms around me so tight then, so tight again. It could happen again, it couldn't, but worrying about it either way doesn't take the place of how good the songs are, or how nice it is to have his glasses on my nightstand occasionally.
Is this a weird post? Do you need to know this? I need to confess this, because there's no need for me to feel like a bad person (cough roommates cough), and I feel like putting these thoughts out into the black hole of the internet is easier than telling them to people, because here, I can just talk and be judged silently or not at all. They're my choices, of an almost twenty-one year old living in Chicago with a predilection towards zombies, chai tea, and obsessive pop culture saturation. My choices, to live and deal with as I please. But it always helps to write them down, to give a voice to the thoughts in my head.
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