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She was an artist like my mother. She was good, and I loved talking to them both about art. I’m NOT an artist! But I have learned life changing concepts from art. Such as, artists rely on shading in order to make things look real. They don’t call it shading though, it’s referred to as “value”. I had long hated my darkness, but through them I learned it’s what made me real. It’s what defined my curves and contours.

Our last conversation was rough. She was hurt and I was wrong. It’s hard communicating in a loving tone when you’re hurt, but she managed because that’s who she is. It’s hard to listen when you know you are the villain of the tale. To know that you’re just one more in a line of people that have used, hurt, and disappointed her. The guilt and shame of it… that’s a private pain that no one less than God would truly understand. That brings me to “perspective”. I thought I saw things clearly, and perhaps I did, but I was standing in a place I didn’t belong and I was focused on things I shouldn’t have been focused on. Everything else began to blur as I tried to make my bad choices seem like good ones.

That conversation was painful. It’s stuck with me, and now I look back on what I did and I shake my head and wonder what was wrong with me! I actually know now. I get it, and I’m not saying I wasn’t dead wrong because I was, but at least now I get it. Over time people get into habits and ruts and we develop narratives and beliefs, and the next thing you know, the relationship that was once great is now damaged or even broken. It happens to every relationship that isn’t diligently working on the relationship regularly. You start to feel unappreciated, or unloved, sometimes even hated or useless. Look at the sheer number of marriages that end in divorce, or the ones that don’t end but probably should have.

I was focused on the entirely wrong things. My perspective seemed to slip a couple of degrees regularly until one day I realized I was looking the entirely wrong direction. If I had ever, just once, put myself in their position and imagined what I was doing from their perspective then I suppose I never would have been able to do it without seeing I was a bad guy. This way I was able to think I was learning and growing and getting better even as I did the opposite. I have an entirely different “emotional perspective” now. My world is different. Once again in large part to her. She has saved me yet again. I have learned volumes from her and now that my perspective is different so are my memories. They’ve taken on new tones.

I’m so grateful for her. I’m grateful that she was there when literally no one was. I’m grateful that she was so comfortable in speaking her mind and her willingness to put me in check. I’m grateful that she went to a lot of trouble to redefine the word “love” for me, because I see it now and it’s the most beautiful thing ever. I’m grateful that she spoke her mind before leaving. I’m grateful that she didn’t try to hurt me back because I would have opened my veins had she requested it that night. I’m just grateful for how she irrevocably changed me for the better. I hope she’s happy. I hope my idiocy passed from her like a fading dream and that she’s perfectly herself.

This song is wonderful. This really is what I’d want to say to her mostly. I wouldn’t want to defend myself. Not that she’d want anything to do with me, but this is what I’d want her to know if she asked. Then she should know that I’m eternally grateful to her and for her. She is the greatest of masterpieces, and like all great art, I am different for having experienced her.

#loner deer #now I’m blind #message in a bottle #Youtube

I love how he expressed himself and showed a playful range with Alison, but what I loved most were songs like this where you can hear him use his voice from Zeppelin. There was such a magical fusion to this, an older guy kind of singing country and then you get a profile and the hair and the voice from Zeppelin then back to him and I swear it felt like fully recognizing he’s still in there. This is just fun.

#robert plant #alison krauss #gone gone gone #Youtube

Awesome

#nate vickers #my immortal #Youtube

somethingbyyou

This is insane! He will leave looking like he survived a battle. The speed and skill and technique is just insane.

#Youtube

I mean, come on! Tom Jones does it with power and drama, but I have heard no one who compares to Tom Ball. This guy is beyond words.

#tom ball #I who have nothing #I #who have nothing #Youtube

“What condemns us is not what we believed, but what we normalized.”

Love his voice

#the nicotine dolls #tired of being alone #Youtube

#mine #love #hate #responsibility #blame #choice as always is yours

I was just told by a friend who happens to have worked with a guy who was the father of a girl I once knew. She was sweet, and kind, and generous in her own ways. A beautiful girl who I could make laugh with a single look and who looked at me like I held the secrets of the universe in my back pocket. She made me feel like a king on somedays, and broke my heart on others. I’m considered naive by some, I’ve often wondered if I’m not on the spectrum, because I just don’t seem to see what others do. Sometimes that’s awesome, sometimes it’s a real issue. With her it has become an issue. She had health issues, both physically and mentally, and I couldn’t differentiate between them and I was told she was manipulating me. If that was true, I don’t know what she was hoping to get. All I knew was that when we were together we laughed like children and seemed to see the same fantastic possibilities life could hold. I think she needed constant attention, but I’m not sure why. She was pretty, so she always seemed to have attention offered to her and she seemed unable to resist it. Guys buzzed around her like flies. She’d show up with a “promise ring” from one and then a week later she’d tell me she was engaged to another. She’d cut herself terribly sometimes. Her arms were a washboard of scars. She dreamed of a romance like her parents had. One that started very young, lead to five children and survived a long term cancer that finally took her mom away from them all. She idolized that woman. I think in a way she’d thought she’d found that. She met a boy while they were young and did stupid and reckless things. They got married. Bought a house. Had children. It seemed like she was so close, but he worked to support them and she was lonely. We talked a few times, but I literally had to tell her that some of what she expected of me was the role a husband should play, and not a friend. I set boundaries and she would simply flit away only to resurface a year or two later to tell about a new health issue, or how she’d met a guy who was married and they were both going to get divorced and run away together. She never wished to be, but she was some times a wrecking ball to other people’s lives and she saw it and loathed it about herself. I know she worried whenever her children showed signs of mental illness that it was due to her presence. I’d like to say that I “lost track of her”, but it’s not true. I simply couldn’t keep up, not safely, so I tried pulling away and when that didn’t work I started avoiding her.

So I was talking with a friend who knew I’d known her father as she’d mentioned him once, I said I knew him and we’d talked about his wife and family. She told me tonight that his daughter had died. I looked it up and there was her face smiling at me the way it did before the fantasy fell apart. Before drugs had robbed her of her teeth. Before dark times set in that I know little to nothing about. My friend. She died about a month ago, just before my birthday. I’m not sure what to feel. Her poor children. Her poor family. Poor her. I wonder what it was, or if I even want to know. I tried to distract myself. I opened YouTube. This song has no reason to be there for me and yet it was. It’s silly, but we both believed in the impossible sometimes. I can’t help but think she knew I’d found out and sent this song to me. I think she’d want me to remember how we once laughed like children. How we tried to be there for one another. How her heart had always tried to be in the right place much the same way that mine had, but neither of us we perfect. I think she’d want me to think of that and not worry about the “what happened?” And the “Why?”. Not to ignore the elephant in the room, but to accept we can’t change it now any more than we ever could have, but to remember laughing until we cried. To remember the time we were both stoned out of our minds and this old guy wouldn’t let me pet his dog but was totally fine that she did. That was a moment we spoke about until the final times we spoke. I hope she’s at peace finally. I hope she’s with her mother again. I hope the illnesses can no longer reach her where she is. But just like this song, it’s terribly sad anyways.

#Youtube

He had no name before her. He was only The Hollow—a kingdom of silence and cold. His dominion was that of dead stones adrift in black seas, worlds of ice and dust circling without purpose throughout time. Sparse in his emptiness. His was a vacancy he scarcely noticed, for it was all he had ever known.

Then she came—the Light. She called him Umbriel, and something in the naming settled deep within him. It was welcome. It was substantive, a weight and presence Umbriel had never known as The Hollow. She herself was called by many names: Zaria, Elanor, Soleil, Aurora. She was dawn and fire, radiance and breath. The light always behind him, the warmth for every shadow he cast.

Where she touched, his barren spheres quickened. Frozen rock melted to rivers, winds began to stir, her very breath carried life into being. Before her, he had been a wound of untold depth. But recognition of her existence cut open his night, and through the fractures her brilliance poured—spilling stars across his body, scattering diamonds in the abyss.

He could not abandon what he was; he was darkness, and always would be. Yet neither could he refuse her space within him. They did not diminish one another. They balanced. Between them, the universe blossomed: his silence and her song, his void and her fire. She brought color to the dark without banishing it, and in return he gave her a boundless canvas, a place to root and bloom.

And they themselves were changed by the other. She found rest in his cool embrace, a calm no flame could offer. He found warmth in her radiance, a glow no shadow could contain. He was the breeze across her summer day; she, the hearth against his frozen heart.

She did not end him; she completed him. He did not bury her; he held her. They felt gratitude, one for the other: not for what they created, but for what they became. That is how all life exists—between the two. Not only in the stars and rivers, but in the quiet wonder of their eternal walk, hand in hand, content in a relationship no force could unmake.