Tolstoy, reworked: all happy endings are alike; every unhappy ending
is unhappy in its own way. “And they lived happily ever after”
doesn’t ask for details the way “it was going so well, until…” does.
And so unhappy songs seem to hold my interest better than happy ones;
and so this is an unhappy love letter from widower to his wife, a
quiet list of memories, a view into the mixed longing and complaint of
a too-short, badly ended life together.
As a writer my reach often exceeds my grasp, and so I fall back on
songwriting, where the shortness of the form keeps me honest but lets
me at least hint at with vignette what I have trouble laying out
explicitly in prose. And having written and recorded the song, I’m
left almost as much as the listener to try and make sense of those
hints myself, to fill in the gaps in the story, the things that
happened between that chance meeting in Asian History and that final
irreparable theft. All the counting out of the years and weeks and
seconds.
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Lyrics:
and the way that we met
in the Purple Room at Powells
at Asian History
and I was browsing for samurai
and you were researching suicide
seppuku
and we joked about the privilege
of affording good beheadings
by your seconds
and the first time we went
to your mother’s house
for Thanksgiving
and the turkey that you
warned me would be too dry
was too dry
and the smile in her eyes
when I went back cheerful
for seconds
and all the time that we had
months in love
months of struggle
and all the time that we lost
all the time that you took
that you stole from us
and I count it all out
by years and weeks and hours
and seconds
***
Preview image by felixtsao.
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