Fossil Creek

It's vitriolic, but it's not nearly as mean as it could be. I suppose you have to know more to make it that, or want to divulge more of your own secrets. But it is the most like a three-verse song I've written; I just need to figure out exactly how long the chorus is going to be.

Fossil Creek
As I'm sitting here in this canyon, I don't feel abandoned.
I'm mad - at how long I wasa led on.

Listen.
You could've communicated better
let me know that others made you wetter
you're a better liar than I ever gave you credit
not surprised I believed you when you said it
when you said you loved me and you cared
even though your heart was never really there
but me, I wanted so badly to believe
I wanted it every time I breathed
so I guess I was easy to deceive
Every single rhyme I wrote you
was another part of me hooked onto
the dream of us fast and true
another reason to tell me what was up
to let me know that once again, I wasn't enough
but you just kept saying I love you
through a mouth wrapped around someone else
as I believed hoped and jumped
and I wrecked myself
now I've got the memory of how she screams
when she creams
it echoes in my dreams
as I watch everyone else climb in her jeans

Chorus:
so when I would lie on a beach and whisper your name
it's better to remember the time I thought we had and the truth were never the same
you looked me in the eye and lied with no shame
you'd already gone with him, you'd already came
so fuck the times we held hands and kissed, running in the rain
fuck me for thinking that when we made love, you felt sparks and flames
fuck cuddling and snuggling on the bedsheets we'd stained
and fuck you for all the ways I changed
trust escaped my grasping hands
and I ceased to feel like a man

I'm grinding out all the memories of you
Smashing out the bits of us, because I'm fucking through
if there's any worth keeping, I don't have a clue
I'll flush 'em all down the drain
good and bad gone just the same
all clean ripped out of my brain
cauterized cleansed and thrown away
murder the moments to build a new day
because looking back, there's no way of knowing
if the good times were just when your lies weren't showing
i'll never know if those times really mattered
and I guess I could be flattered
to be one of the bugs splattered
on the windshield of your life
impaled because I believed right into your knife
silly hick who thought he'd found a partner and a wife
now I know better than to cut my strings
to freefall for love or emotional things
so keep my parts I've already locked up my heart
thanks, I guess, for the lessons learned
and the scars burned
If it weren't for you
I might slip again into something fake true
so forget bending my neck
and the ache in my chest
I'd rather keep what's left of my pride
than give someone else access inside

Chorus

Like a fish with hooks in my cheeks
and a pole in my mouth to pull me in
I was a junkie chasing a race
I was never gonna win
You smashed a hole right through what I thought I knew
The kryptonite for my belief in love, baby, that was you
The straw that broke this camel's back
Ripped my heart right off its tracks
See, strike one was the girl in my hometown
for nearly three years we fooled around and held it down
but she just wasn't the queen to wear my crown
second was the girl with the wicked guitar
had plenty of dreams that we would go far
but when she took a year off
I was too chicken and soft
didn't think I could make it
and decided to break it off
a horrible mistake I don't get to take back
etched in my heart is her name on a crack
and then there was you
the third I thought true
you cheated on me and betrayed me
laughed and out of pity laid me
kept me hooked thinking you still wanted me
but all you really did was laugh and taunt me
I don't want your silly poems and your stupid lyrics
they're not apologies or answers so I don't want to hear it
you were right, and I was wrong
the girl who didn't wear thongs
who stuck around for way too long
proved to me love is barely for songs
and that relationships are a joke
bound like burning bridges to end up in smoke
now I know that never
is a whole lot more likely than forever and ever
soon as you meet someone on whom you can depend
know they're set to betray you in the end
so forget saying thanks for reality
or teaching these facts to me
come to think of it, you were just a bitch to me

Chorus

Written - with morning beers in a canyon, waiting for everyone else to wake up for the adventure walk; after Christmas eve shopping in a bar, and at home on Christmas Day.

I think the chorus might just be the lines that start with fuck; maybe I could have a bridge somewhere, too:

I don't know why I tried
when there were so many other guys
I don't know why you tried
when there were so many lies
I don't know why we tried
when we should've just said goodbye

...quiet, slower, spoken? I think it depends on the beat I put together.

Anyway, the memories really do come fewer and further between. Last night, unbidden as I was falling asleep, I had a really vivid one - the way she looked back in my dorm, her eyes glittering and her lips pursed in a slow smile, the day I took her blindfolded to that restaurant and Pilobolus. I suppose, in my mind, there was love and passion that day, but probably not.

You never really know. I don't think all the shit happened that could have, but there's no denying the serious possibility. If someone holds you and tells you they could never lie to you, and then you find out two years later they could easily do just that, there are plenty of questions.

That birthday dinner was a week before she got with Josh. A week. If her words then had some truth, I'd been boring and unalive for awhile, and I guess that would include that night - boring, unalive, without spark or shine. More likely, she met him and thoughts of me strayed.

Or maybe what she said was real - who knows. I won't.

The most sympathetic view I can come up with for her in us is that she was just young and confused, maybe uninvested, unprepared, or frightened.

The sympathetic view fits with some things - not with her spending a week fucking her ex and then spending two nights with me, but not wanting to tell me anything because "it would hurt me too much." That's not "inward," it was just deceptive and self-serving - it let her do what she wanted, without having to see me in pain.

Her poem said I took the long route out of getting over her - really? As opposed to her way, the short route? I gave a fuck; I believed; I lost my faith in things by the time it was done and I was hanging on like I was dragged behind a bronco in a bad movie.

She condescendingly told me that she "understood I would need to villainize her" or some such shit like that - I didn't need to villainize anyone else I dated, and I didn't realize that villainization was some necessary part of a break-up. (Was it for her? Or is that just for humans who are unfortunately bound by emotions?) It's funny - yeah, I villainized her; because she spent three months letting me think she wanted me and loved me while she had no such interest, that she spent those three months telling me cutesy things while fucking other people.

And that's what's interesting, now - it isn't whether she fucked Josh and Tony or whoever else, or just kissed them, or nothing at all - it's that I'm sure she betrayed me in some way, and that seems like enough. If she was "involved" with Josh, I'm sure there was more than kissing; whether that meant they were fucking behind my back or that he was the one she went to when she needed to talk about shit, it was still horrible - especially since she wouldn't talk to me about things. Tony - who she fed in Dod, who she'd change her underwear before she went to have dinner with his parents, while I spent months wrapped up in play rehearsals - who the fuck knows. And anyone else?

Fuck it - I'll never know; she couldn't even bother to tell me why it was she stayed with me. Of course you would stay with someone you didn't love or respect; it's inertia, it's not wanting to be the one to do the breaking. All she could do was send me some song - the point being "Hey, I'm aware you're in pain?" "Or, haha, she's off and doesn't care anymore?" or who-the-fuck-knows - and some poem where she acted like I would be confused by metaphors, implied that getting over me took nothing at all (no surprise there), and that she'd always given me her all - as in, not telling me the truth for three months.

Oh well X-p
(and her poem wasn't bad; it just wasn't what I gave a fuck about haha)

It was nice to put that into typed text that isn't scrawled in notebooks -there's something clean about putting my poems and songs on here. I wrote almost a whole song on the way to Hidden Valley to go tubing (I wrote the song out and most of this before we left).

I have a lot to write about school and break; but I'm heading to the South Side soon. We'll see. Pot roast calls. :-)