Alison Rosen Is Your New Best Friend

This one’s sad.

Twelve years ago someone close to me died. If you’d have known me at the time it was all I really talked about and I also wrote poetry about it and strange prose poems and short stories and marveled at the way the pain caused this preponderance of words, this spillage, really, and not the frozen numbed out wordlessness you’d expect. If I may be precious for a moment, you could say the pain existed in hypercolor, even though when I remember that period of time it’s usually in a smudgy grays. Pardon me, I think I made myself puke.

Anyway, and this is a tangent, but I still feel a bit sheepish about the fact that I so clearly allowed everyone around me to witness my mourning but perhaps even more sheepish that my mourning outfit consisted mostly of black leggings, various shiny shirts and a black fake fur coat which I used to quip was made either of poodle or gorilla. I also wore an animal print scarf around my neck because I was playing in the band at this point and we were all about fake fur and animal print. I wore this whole ensemble in the summer in the  height of my wanting to disappear, which is ironic. It was around this time that my car died and I had to get a  new one which felt like a colossal bummer and yet another example of the way the world was cruel and sucked because I really liked that first car and I really didn’t feel like being a part of any world which would steal the life of my friend and somehow test driving cars and dropping umpteen thousands of dollars on one felt like compliance. But I had shit to do and places to go so I dragged my heels and shlumped along to various car dealerships with my mom who was gently urging me toward life. I almost bought an Integra which is a smallish car but at the last  minute I worried I would feel claustrophobic in this car with my amp in the back and my furry coat around me in the front and so I bought a Honda Accord. I bought a larger car specifically for the coat. That’s how much I clung to that mourning outfit. Incidentally, I no longer have the coat but I still have the car and still hate it with all my might. (My first car also was a Honda Accord but there was a massive redesign in the intervening years.)

That was a long tangent. What I was saying was twelve years ago I was a sad furry thing but I worked through a fair amount of all that and the rest of it just kind of receded and now I barely think of any of it except for the death anniversary which usually hits me just a little. So anyway tonight I was reading Twitter and I read something singer Kristin Hersh (Throwing Muses) said and then I went to her web site and was reading the message boards and there was a mention of someone who covered one of her songs—“Your Ghost”—on Grey’s Anatomy and I remembered that I’d heard that song on the show and wondered who covered it and was meaning to check.

Then I started thinking about the song which, if you haven’t heard it, below is the video,

Kristin Hersh – “Your Ghost” (featuring Michael Stipe)

Laura | MySpace Video

and wondered what the lyrics were, even though I knew them already, so I looked them up and as I was reading them it just all hit me again, both because I think I must have been listening to that song around the time he died and also because the lyrics brought back the memory of wanting so badly to call his house after he died to see if  his voice was still on the answering machine and just because I felt like I still had this special number which could bring me a tiny bit closer to something which was now permanently out of reach.

And then I just started crying like I haven’t cried in about twelve years. Full body paroxysms, which I’m kind of having as I type this actually.

I recall my therapist at the time saying that the thing about mourning is that if you don’t work through all of it it’s likely to just sneak up on you one day because the unconcious has no sense of time. Perhaps this is true but I can tell you for a fact that my unconcious has never been late for a movie or lunch date and is usually a few minutes early even!

What was I saying? I don’t know, I got tired of saying it all. It’s just weird the way something can suddenly bring everything up again, especially when you’re trying to get other stuff done.