whenever i discover a new song, that specific song remains on repeat for hours and hours and for days on end until i can't bear to hear it one more time. this song becomes the theme song to my life for that moment in time. i walk to the sound of it and sleep to the thought of it until i yearn for something new. just as i do when i discover these new songs, i've rediscovered the songs that found themselves rewound and replayed over and over for years during high school. these were the songs i played on the cd player that i painted over with acrylic paints making it unmistakably mine. these were the songs that i downloaded and burned onto one of my many mix cds. throughout the years, the contents of my bookbag changed from my sketchbook to my journal, to my camera, and to my books. but during my long walks to and from school, as i walked down the halls, and as i lay in bed in my room...these songs were always in my company.
listening to these songs again makes me feel like i'm being transported back to the moments in time where all that i felt, the truest of emotions were all brimming at the surface. as strange as it sounds, i wish i could go back in time just so that i could hear these songs the way i once did. nothing hidden, nothing restrained, no doubts in what i knew. honesty in its most modest terms.



After All - Dar Williams (a song with a beauty that never ceases to astound me)
Go ahead, push your luck
Find out how much love the world can hold
Once upon a time I had control
And reigned my soul in tight
Well the whole truth
It's like the story of a wave unfurled
But I held the evil of the world
So I stopped the tide
Froze it up from inside
And it felt like a winter machine
That you go through and then
You catch your breath and winter starts again
And everyone else is spring bound

And when I chose to live
There was no joy
It's just a line I crossed
It wasn't worth the pain my death would cost
So I was not lost or found

And if I was to sleep
I knew my family had more truth to tell
And so I traveled down a whispering well
To know myself through them

Growing up, my mom had a room full of books
and hid away in there
Her father raging down a spiral stair
'Til he found someone
Most days his son
And sometimes I think
My father, too, was a refugee
I know they tried to keep their pain from me
They could not see what it was for

But now I'm sleeping fine
Sometimes the truth is like a second chance
I am the daughter of a great romance
And they are the children of the war

Well the sun rose
With so many colors, it nearly broke my heart
It worked me over like a work of art
And I was a part of all that

So go ahead, push your luck
Say what it is you gotta say to me
We will push on into that mystery
And it'll push right back
And there are worse things than that
Cause for every price
And every penance that I could think of
It's better to have fallen in love
Than never to have fallen at all

'Cause when you live in a world
Well it gets into who you thought you'd be
And now I laugh at how the world changed me
I think life chose me after all