Dead Horses and Other Weighty Lyrics

 I choose preferred music in two ways:  I either like the sound or I like the lyrics. Often enough, I like the sound and the lyrics and that is the recipe for a favorite song forever and ever. 

I play favorite songs often. Many times, I search out those songs because I need it at the moment.

 

For a few months now, I hit repeat:

I'm always dragging that horse around....
 Tonight I'm gonna bury that horse in the ground......

But I like to keep some things to myself
I like to keep my issues drawn
It's always darkest before the dawn.

-"Shake It Out" Florence and the Machine

 

I can be cruel
I don't know why
Why can't my balloon stay up in a perfectly windy sky

-"Cruel" Tori Amos

 

I urge myself to bury my dead horses.  They have become so heavy and cumbersome over the years.

But I honestly don't know how to even begin the hole in the ground. 

My constant dead horses include near paralyzing fear of losing everyone I love, a persistent battle with depression, guilt over too many things to list, and the struggle to be who I am naturally, something I can't change, knowing all the while that who I am is a disappointment to many people that love me.

 

The heaviest horse comes and goes.  Appearing and disappearing on my shoulders.  He is anger.  Sickening anger that consumes me.  It is one of my issues that I keep drawn to myself because it is not the legacy I want to leave.  Angry is not a word I want to follow my memory. 

 

I don't recall carrying that particular horse before the day my mom died, but I still wonder if he has always been there.  Was I an angry child?  I have been called a "willful" and "not easy" child.

 

 But maybe I began carrying that horse the moment I knelt above her and watched her take her last breath.  I certainly gained the fearful horse at that moment.  

 

I keep a fairly tight leash but when the anger erodes my leash, there is a spectacular display of fireworks.  It burns me and my loved ones without regard for damages.  I become cruel, my tongue a weapon.  Another undesirable word I never want to follow my memory.  

 

Before the most recent repeats:

  

Where did I go wrong? I lost a friend
Somewhere along in the bitterness

-"How to Save a Life" The Fray

You can get addicted to a certain kind of sadness
Like resignation to the end, always the end

-"Somebody I Used To Know" Goyte

 

I can't speak for most women, but I have always preferred to have one or two "best friends," for lack of a more mature phrase.  Another girl/woman who I could confide in, be there for, love.  I have had some amazing best friends, ever since elementary school.  Inevitably though, something goes wrong. 

Well, maybe not exactly wrong...perhaps some ended just because growth in opposite directions is natural. 

 

But others definitely went wrong.  After the age of 16, it was almost always due to my anger and cruelty.  I hurt the ones I loved the most.  Then the tides turned and some hurt me before I could hurt them.  

 

It is unfortunate because no matter how it ends, no matter whose fault, even if I sub-consciously sabotaged the relationship, it all feeds into my fears, bitterness, and by extension, anger. 

 

The most unfortunate aspect of it all is that when I become close to someone new, I am too guarded, walled up, and give them only enough of myself as to be available and caring but still avoid hurt.  I think of it as not giving them power over me.   They do not have the ammunition needed to hurt me.  Closed, hard-hearted, guarded....even more words I do not my wish for my legacy. 

The one I repeat and want to believe:

 

You show me how to see
That nothing is whole and nothing is broken 

-"Sanctuary" Utada

 

The concept of that rolls in my head.  I want it to be true.  That I am neither whole nor broken.  That I just am.  That my life, with its dead horses, just is. 

 

So I no longer keep these issues to myself in the hope that what I actually leave behind meshes with what I wish to leave behind.