There is hope in letting it all hang out.
Says the bartender to me
There is strength in bottling everything up.
Say I to the bartender.
There is comfort in remembering those things we leave behind.
Says the bartender to me.
There is relief in leaving those things.
Say I to the bartender.
There is
Another customer
Those teenage refusals (those adamant declarations of right) of the only things our parents knew to give us-those voids- are the only things we keep with us.
Say I to my glass
Those life lessons that you can't pick out of your mind, like barbeque ribs cooked for ten hours now stuck in your teeth
Those family traditions you are dripping in like sticky sweet lemonade on the juicy ridge of your upper lip
We are the pictures of what we have tried so hard not to be
All we have left are the paths we've cut escaping the mud and the music and the mess
Of leaving afternoons so bright they have no choice but to shatter into a million lightning bugs by dusk
There was a joy before there was questioning
( )
Pray to a season that has abandoned me. Take me home. Roll me up in your hills and stuff me with dry itchy grass and remember me to myself.
(Even if this memory isn't mine. It's someone's. Probably the memory of this girl sitting next to me. She slides her finger up and down the sweat of her cider while I rock my Jameson into an eddy of time passing wonder whirls. The circular swirl tugs my heart into its gleam and my eye reflects back to my eye, struck golden from the overhead light and I want to fall in, like an orange balloon mistaking the sun for its mother.)
I want to go home.
Says the bartender to me
There is strength in bottling everything up.
Say I to the bartender.
There is comfort in remembering those things we leave behind.
Says the bartender to me.
There is relief in leaving those things.
Say I to the bartender.
There is
Another customer
Those teenage refusals (those adamant declarations of right) of the only things our parents knew to give us-those voids- are the only things we keep with us.
Say I to my glass
Those life lessons that you can't pick out of your mind, like barbeque ribs cooked for ten hours now stuck in your teeth
Those family traditions you are dripping in like sticky sweet lemonade on the juicy ridge of your upper lip
We are the pictures of what we have tried so hard not to be
All we have left are the paths we've cut escaping the mud and the music and the mess
Of leaving afternoons so bright they have no choice but to shatter into a million lightning bugs by dusk
There was a joy before there was questioning
( )
Pray to a season that has abandoned me. Take me home. Roll me up in your hills and stuff me with dry itchy grass and remember me to myself.
(Even if this memory isn't mine. It's someone's. Probably the memory of this girl sitting next to me. She slides her finger up and down the sweat of her cider while I rock my Jameson into an eddy of time passing wonder whirls. The circular swirl tugs my heart into its gleam and my eye reflects back to my eye, struck golden from the overhead light and I want to fall in, like an orange balloon mistaking the sun for its mother.)
I want to go home.
Photo by Sadie Myers. Words by Stephanie Chavara.
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