I understand that expression now, ‘bottled up’. It has to be a bottle because when bottles are shaken pressure mounts inside. You’re corked. I have full ability to get my words out, and to put them on paper, or in music, or maybe relay them to a therapist, but I don’t. I subconsciously refuse. It’s so awful, but it’s too pathetic to be valid. What I like about poetry is that sometimes you’ll stumble across a poem that perfectly encapsulates a specific feeling or thought you’re experiencing. And I’m not talking about “I love you” – which the most unobservant person will realise is the message of every song, poem, book, movie, speech, everything – but “I am sitting in an unknown café while it’s snowing outside, and everything feels perfect and good in this moment even though I am only sitting in a café alone” like in Bukowski’s “Nirvana”. Or “Everything is too much or too little and, for a while, I don’t want to concern myself with anything, especially anything man-made” like in Dionne Brand’s “I am giving up on land to light on”. We studied that poem in my English class and the only thing anyone could talk about were the anti-colonial themes, but it can be so much more than that.
Do you know how isolating it is to hear “I love you” in every piece of media and art and song when you’re not in love and have never been in love? I don’t pity people who have had their heart broken because there are a million heartbreak songs and a thousand movies about breakups. There are no songs about never having felt love. There are no songs that capture those specific feelings. It’s either “I love you” or “I loved you”.
Even this essay-poem-disaster has become about love. God.
I feel like I’m speaking a different language that only I speak. I can only translate it through songs and poems – sometimes book characters – but that’s at best a half-translation. Maybe a line here or there will cover a side feeling, but never the heart of it. I imagine that if you’re in love, any old Shakespeare sonnet will do pretty well. Do you know “I Am A Rock” by Simon and Garfunkle? That’s the closest I’ll come.
For example, angsty love issues aside, I really want to leave my home city. My home city is beautiful, I love my family, and I’ve loved growing up here. (‘Love’ in this context is okay, for your information.) But I yearn to leave, and see other things, and get away from all the people I love. Maybe in Barcelona I’ll find whatever I’m looking for.
