Golani

How do we resonate with language? And how much of myself can be based in sound to provide me the stability my aerial, often heedless nature lacks? When I feel like running away, I habitually turn to music, both when reality gets to be too much and too little.

I'm thinking a lot, an amalgam of stories. Of things happening or already past. I'm busy projecting. It's been almost a year since that time I said "a year from now...". I meant it. See, I was worried I was making the wrong choice. A year from then, but alright now. Or is it? Is it just a different reality, and is it silly of me not to appreciate the betterness of this reality, from where else I might've ended up?

Guess for every reality, there's a could've been worse. But also a better. And how do I maintain equilibrium between the two? To think I could've lived out a year in such a different way. Or perhaps three. Called myself a middle-aged woman on somebody else's dime. Did I realize the great weight of its price, or was I perhaps just lucky, stepping out of my own way at the precise right time?

Am busy. Caught too much in the process of stabilizing, where I'll be a year from now. It's the first time I think so focusedly. In the past, often taking a laissez-faire approach. Can't say, baby, where I'll be in a year. Figured if it was good enough for Steven Tyler, why not me?

Am I escaping now, and am I fated by my very nature to keep living experiences I long to leave? Am I meant to exist as a witch of the forest, and will the fatefulness of it all make it hurt less? I am weighing my options, and I do so through music. Helps me reflect on the person that I have been.

Just because this is the way things have been so far doesn't mean this is how they must always be. And I'm asking myself, well, why not? Just because I've been lucky enough to know some of the answers of my life at an early age doesn't mean I know by now all the answers. Burning bush, absence of, does that mean I'm slated to wander the next fifty years aimlessly through the desert?

What am I doing back here? I guess I feel safe in the music of my adolescence. Remember the first time I saw this guy, cursing out a member of the audience, giving him too much lip. The cheekiness of him, the way he fucking moved. The realization you're witnessing somebody real.

Despising their love songs in equal measure to wanting them. Think of him often when my breasts are bare, but only in passing. I know so much more than I did at 17, and can continue to be grounded in men's understanding of sex and love only in passing. It's obvious to me now I must pursue my own truth, and it's so much more complex than the one painted in the songs of my youth.

And to think, at the time, it seemed so hard. As a child, I thought (somehow) I'd encounter one point of revelation, perhaps upon turning 18, maybe when falling in love the first time. But now I see, they're slated regularly throughout life, if I'm lucky. That I'm encountering new points of revelation, am traversing one right now. Much harder, more complex. Something that, strong as I was, at 17, I would've never known how to traverse. Who knows where you'll be 10 years from now?

Arguably, a conversation between the artist's public persona and the artist's deeper self, an eternal question of selling out and losing integrity.

Daca n-ajungeam eu peste Prut, batrane..
Tu mureai de foame-aici, ca un caine.
Asa ca nu ma provoca si n-o sa te atac,
Eu nu-s obligat sa-ti plac.
(Had I not crossed the Prut [river], old man,
You would've starved here like a dog.
So don't provoke, and I won't attack,
I don't have to be liked by you.)

But maybe a conversation between past and present selves also (old man?). While I use, often, my old self as a compass for how my life is turning out, it does raise an interesting question here. Who I thought I'd be tethers me, to a great extent, but also risks restricting me. Compressing me. This is all I am, because this is all I thought I'd be. But who sets limit for 10 years into the future?

While the above rings interesting always, it's this part of the song that seems most salient to me:

Anti alchimist sunt, schimb aurul in plumb.
Il topesc si-apoi il beau pana la fund,
Ca gustul lui amar as ma transforme-n tun,
Sa pot s-arunc in aer tot ce-ti sta in drum.
(Anti-alchemist I am, turn gold to lead,
Melt and drink it down to the last,
So that its bitter taste may turn me to a cannon,
So I may blow away everything that gets in my way.)

Alchemy, Jung's burning bush. The temerity of pursuing something you don't fully understand. Of holding open a new door. To blow away everything that gets in my way, I must be ready to include my former self.