And what difference does it make for you and me?
All delighted people, raise your hands.
This song is truly one of my favourite love songs. It is beautiful, long and rambling on, quiet at parts, soft, loud, very dramatic, eerie, happy, silly, nonsensical, tragic, ponderous, all throughout a small 11 minutes and 39 seconds. Gorgeous. And all with the voice of the angel Sufjan; high-pitched and light, floating and cracked, like a fragile glass in a sturdy Roman Catholic church. Oh so beautiful. I love you so much anyway. On your breast I gently lay; your arms surround me in the lake. I am joined with you forever. I want this to be "our" song. Whoever the other part of "our" is. I am writing you letters, love. I am waiting in limbo for you, love. I am trying to be faithful and lovely and myself, a child of our God, a kind and gentle mother, a strong student, a woman filled with purpose and charity. As of late I have been jealous and tired and wandering and confused and someone-who-is-not-me. I have strayed. Or perhaps I was never on the right path. Sera que... I have been on the wrong path, one parallel to yours in a thin wood, a sylvan valley, so close, yet going down a different path. They do not meet. We cannot meet--and I am sure of it--until I join the final path, my love. The people I meet now, today, yesterday, tomorrow: they cannot be you. There is no way, my dear. God has let it be known to me. I have waited so long, but I now know that I have been just procrastinating. Telling the world surrounding me: it is hard to be me. Hard to be nice. Hard to be kind. Easy to be cruel. Easy to be superfluous and flailing like a blind cat in the street. I am slowly piecing through the rubble, and it is hard. So far from comfortable. I feel as though I am blind, deaf, senseless, mute. It is a dark, matted haze through which I sift my daily doings. I am relieved to the fact that I am young, I am 17-years-old, I am not down a path the same as my brother, I am not mentally ill or poor or ruined or orphaned or anything drastic. I am simply a person on this planet who is confused by herself, who feels as if someone else has had a fun time in my body, fun time controlling, and it is time for her to go back. It is my time. And I am joining all my thoughts to you. I'm preparing every part for you. That is beautiful. The focus and the devotion of that concept. That we can spent a whole life, be it 10 or 100 years, joining and preparing for a certain cause, one thing, one beautiful, unblemished entity that promises security and joy. That is the life I do want. That life of purpose, not of quiet desperation. The one that nourishes, not the one that kills slowly at night. The one that is of quiet purpose, quiet faith, quiet devotion. Quiet love. Love truly is quiet, is it not? It is quiet and calm as a still water in the winter. It is not filled with pomp and diamonds. It is patient, as St. Paul says in his Letters to the Corinthians. Patient and kind and does not rejoice in suffering. Anything that does is masked by our little Devil as love. But it is hate and it is harmful.
Oh my Mother, she betrayed us, but our Father loved and bathed us. Nature does love us betrayed to our desires and to the flesh. The ills that flesh is heir to. 'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. When you crochet, I feel mesmorised and proud.
This is a new year. And I promise, I will not destroy myself in my failures. I will try. Just the mere thought of trying frightens me, because I am scared of failing. So, so scared. I have failed so many times. Every year.
I have hope.
