In a horror movie when the car won't start you give it one last try
The family unit seems to have sufficiently dissolved. When this happened, I do not know. One second it seems like you are ten and taking vacations to tropical southern locales, and the next thing you know it’s Easter Sunday 17 years later and you’re calculating the coordinates of disaster. The family unit is probably more closely akin to a burning building, now. I tend not to notice until it’s a holiday, and then it all becomes clear. I still hang out, make a go of the Easter brunch, but it’s hard looking at the fledgling form and the coming apart at the seams. “We are definitely a lively bunch,” I offer to the table today. Which may just elicit the kind of responses I’m more used to getting around the house these days. “Oh, it’s you,” my mom has said to me on entering recently. She doesn’t mean it, really. It pretty much all just broils down to her secret desire to run off with some sketchy hillbilly, and my further solidification of the overarching identity as Failure. It’s cool, I can take it—for about the duration of time it takes to get yelled at for eating all the pancakes. “See you around,” I say before making an exit.

Out of doors and into the sunny afternoon. Thankfully, there seems to be one location open today, as everyone I know seems to be involved in the intricate webs of social obligation and backyard barbeques that tend to characterize this holiday. That’s one thing I happen to be liberated from at the moment while simultaneously being burdened by at the same time. Border’s bookstore turns out to be my refuge. I can hang around in there, blend in with the sketchy vagrants, listen to albums I cannot yet afford at the listening station. That kind of thing. They are playing Cesaria Evora throughout the store today, and immediately I’m experiencing the placebo of context. The first girl I ever loved was into this album, and I remember listening to it on the floor of her dorm room at the elaborate liberal arts college she attended. The window was open and looked out over a courtyard, with the faint aria of college students coming and going. It did something to me, that song, which I had never heard before. It was a lightning rod of emotion that seemed to transcend genre and style and language, and hit me right between the eyes. And as we sat together on the floor that day, we cried and cried. And now, as a result, whenever I hear this song I tend to have the type of reaction that has me jogging for the exits. I know from my own experience a couple weeks ago that other human beings do not want anything to do with others who are offering up some wanton emotional display. And that’s understandable. So it’s out of the doors and into the world, crashing into people who are making an entry through those same doors, and getting in the car just in time to experience the paroxysm of emotion that seems to accompany listening to International music for me.

There seems to be no room for me outside of sadness today, on a day that is supposed to be about rebirth and rising up. I see a bumper sticker today that reads, Life is the school and love is the lesson. But mostly, the lesson seems to be alluding me. Or at the very least, showing up in song form long enough to remind me how sad things end up being. The gods, clearly, are messing with me, and they seem to be demonstrating a proclivity for Cesaria Evora. They could have better taste. But then, they could have worse, too.