POD314 Lyrics

In the endless perfection of your absence." That's a line from a poem by Sharon Olds. I've been thinking that line non-stop since my birth mother died. Endless. Perfection. Absence. They're such whole words. I just keep - I don't know, I just keep thinking about her death over and over... the line between her living here among us and being gone... forever. I just can't get over it, you know? How can you go from something to nothing just like that? I open my fridge and there's this orange juice I bought last week and I think, 'When I got that, Ellie was alive' and now she's dead but the orange juice is still just sitting there in the fridge. It's a strange thing to focus on but it's these little things that I get stuck on most. When someone is gone, they're gone forever and all you have left is memories to try and recreate that person that used to live and breathe right in front of you.

It's weird, like when you're in love, all of sudden you're hearing in these love songs all like for the first time, you know, like the singer is suddenly just talking to you alone, reading your mind... and when you're grieving it's the same thing. I'm in tune with all the sadness of the universe the universe suddenly. You know, songs find you, poems find you, people find you.

This is the other poem I was thinking of. We read it in sixth grade and then I thought about my adoptive mother, you know, she died when I was in second grade... and I don't think I really thought about that poem since... really not even once, but after Ellie died, the whole poem came back to me. Like riding a bike, I guess. It was called, "St. John the Divine" and it's about this girl and she had this crush on a guy, this like older guy you know, she never hooked up with him or anything but... she just loved him... and then he died, and it's like she just can't stop thinking about him still. So anyway, this is how the poem goes:

"I think about you a lot now; up there in heaven with the lovely angels.
Whose hair you get tangled up in. Silly how jealous of them I am."

You know, it's just so weird that the guy she's talking about is dead, he's gone but she's still thinking about how she wishes she was with him. How now the angels get to flirt with him instead of her. I don't know, I thought it was cool.

When my mom died when I was little, it was horrible. I mean obviously, but it was different when Ellie died. I think it's like chicken pox, you know, when you get them when you're little, they suck, but you get over them, but if you don't get them when you're young then you get them when you're older, and it's much more serious. I just have more questions this time around. You know, I keep thinking more about why things happen the way they do. How we're supposed to just go on when we lose someone. I know it's gonna be alright eventually. I know that this too shall pass, but right now, I just can't stop feeling that someone is gone... that was just here... and it's as simple and endlessly complicated as that. I mean, I hear a song on the radio and I want to talk to Ellie about it, you know, or a joke and I know she would like it, you know, and the worst is when I think of something I really wanted to know about her life, but I never asked her... and why I didn't think about these things when she was alive, I don't know, but... you know, I wanna know if she ever bit her nails, I wanna know what posters she had up in her room when she was thirteen, I wanna know what she used to eat for dinner with my grandparents... and I wanna know if she was in love with my dad. And when she was here... I just wanted to be with her, I didn't think of all these questions. I mean, I guess I did but asking her about all that stuff felt like it would have been a waste of the little time we had together. Or for some reason though, it'd be weirdly impersonal, you know, that none of that would make this important as us hanging out, talking about what we wanted to.... and now she's gone and it's like they're washing over me like a dam is broken. It's regret.

I think that really is the worst kind of pain, you know, guilt is bad and sadness is bad, but regret is this sickly combination of both. Okay, so this is weird but the second I started talking about this regret and how bad it's making me feel, I mean, God in the instant I said that last sentence I just started to feel better, you know, like a lot better. Something about getting out all these thoughts into the air, it just really lifts them out of me and lessens what I'm carrying around... and all of a sudden, I had this feeling like she's listening too, and I know she didn't believe in regret and that makes me feel happy. Well who would have thought, right? It makes me think of the Thurston Moore song, Psychic Hearts that goes, "Sadness is, and sadness was and sadness will always be because comfort comes around from the strangest of men." Podcast, you are the strangest of men for sure. Thank you. Goodnight.