the titan who fell, sondheim
– a eulogy of sorts.
I’m one of those people that found out about Stephen Sondheim through the films of Noah Baumbach. Countless times, you’ll find Baumbach’s themes circle around the musical meanderings of Sondheim, a titan I did not know had influenced the way my mind works, the way I’ve created characters or stories.
I’m not a writer. I like writing. There’s a difference there I wish I could express to people that made the most sense, but it wasn’t until Adam Driver’s rendition of Being Alive from Company did I finally understand how incredible of a person Sondheim was. How music is written, how it is cried out, drawn out. Screamed. In humor and tragedy, how the two go so well hand in hand.
Somebody sit in my chair,
and ruin my sleep,
and make me aware,
of being alive.
How could you write lines so honestly and evoke such feelings without realizing what they do to a person.
somebody need me too much,
somebody know me too well
So much discomfort piles on top of the song as the singer’s voice reaches a tidal wave of passion that you cannot help but feel, exist, breathe.
Recently I’ve been feeling different. Maybe it’s the drop in temperature. Maybe it’s the truth. A good friend put it point blank, “You’re getting too comfortable here. It’s time for you to move on.”
He meant this well. He meant this from the heart, but I was furious, and when I left I was left with an emptiness I didn’t know how to fill. Not books, not movies. Not sex, not friends, not even the close ones.
When you corner me into a truth, I become a fragment of forgotten history and a history that I am forgetting. Which, by pure logic, wipes me from the face of the earth.
I couldn’t learn the words of Being Alive because the words would circle. I would swap someone for somebody in lines too early, saying know instead of need in different stanzas. I confused hurt and hold. Countless times. Stretching the wrong vowels, putting too much feeling in the wrong melodies. I harmed harmonies.
But this is how his songs work.
I was younger then..
They work like human life works. Circling. Treading water. Ways of survival by repetition, to reach a higher sort of understanding, empathy even.
I saw everything..
I feel like I’m doing everything wrong. Or doing everything at the wrong time. Or that there is not enough time and I’m feeling whatever time I do have with wrongness. I am so wrong, so crooked on a path I paved for myself that I’m bearing too much awareness. My eyes are dry from looking at my flaws, up close and personal.
Just this past weekend, I woke up from a sleep with perhaps the wrong person altogether. Too often in the night, I reached over to hold him only to want to turn over to the other edge of the bed for air. And when we had brunch the next morning, we had nothing to say to each other because I’ve run out of material. I’m out of all the right questions, the honest ones, the ones I mean, the ones that pry. And we were left with nutrition that only resulted to another string of pretty pictures for our Instagram stories.
And this is my life. A series of pretty pictures to remain as quick glimpses in a life drawn out too long, too filtered, and, now, too boring. I am almost thirty and I am boring.
By the end of every year, I truly ask myself what I’ve learned. Yes, I look in a mirror and ask the damned question, and I answer out loud because I know all too well that my head overthinks answers that circle into spirals and spiral into a numbing hum that breaks my concentration from the very living of life.
So, what have I learned? Loved? Not much. Maybe parts of myself. A fragment of the day, under the floorboards, skin. Walls, images and objects taped and hung up on those walls, what I show, what I project, how other project unto me, how I copy, how coy and how comfortable I’ve been.
I perhaps have been too comfortable in this life abroad that I’ve reached the uncomfortably of it. Like a wool sweater worn enough times that leaves you itchy and red enough to donate it to charity, to be someone else’s forgotten problem.
But having lived a life so uncomfortable, is it so bad to be comfortable, to ride this mundane joy for a few years? Because I deserve it. Because of so many years of being blue, of the trials and tribulations of a harsh life, I get a little time I can call my own, claim, a little extra food, a little bit of a belly, portions of gluttony I never got a chance to have in my earlier years. Is that all so bad? To spoil myself now when I couldn’t before?
And I don’t know.
I don’t know.
I leave myself at the end of each year with more questions than the previous year, and I do it all over again.
Sondheim, I am the someone in the tree, creating and remembering as I go, rehearsing and improvising until I don’t know what I’m doing anymore.
It’s the fragment, not the day
It’s the pebble, not the stream
It’s the ripple, not the sea
That is happening
Not the building but the beam
Not the garden but the stone
Only cups of tea
And history
And someone in a tree
