borrowing lots of words

i'm borrowing other people's words again. "it's about repairing the existing." original context was notions of urban renewal and how we generally get it wrong--by trying to erect something new and incongruent instead of dealing with the reality of the community in synthesis... ("can't put no band-aid on this cancer") but i'm not here to talk about architecture...


"Sometimes when I lay down at night
I swear I can see to heaven
For it's in dreaming that the things
I always knew
are the only thoughts I have...

But it's a hard road that we follow
The saddest cities, the darkest hollows

But I hear it in your voice, love
Like someone sweetly willing
The hope of all these years,
the prayer of a time
that we don't even know

I hear it in your voice, love
The strongest sound
I've ever heard
Like water from a well
so deep in the ground
I'll never thirst again

But it's a hard road that we follow
The saddest cities, and the darkest hollows

And everything that's far away
And was lost from me
I see it all from here
In you

--bits and pieces from "hollow" by Hem


and, yes, this is all somehow about renewal. about repairing the existing. about not running away. about finding the good that is there, that has always been there--in the "things i always knew" kind of way.

"the life i'm living is completely foreign to me--yet it's mine. life here is like a permanent out of body experience, like i'm off somewhere watching this other me from a distance. 'did that just happen? did i really just say that? how is this my life?' but i want it. i want to understand it, to experience all of this. even when i know it won't make sense for another ten years, if even then. as much as i'm not ok here sometimes, i can't imagine wanting to be anywhere else. it's beautiful here. and terrifying and humiliating and exhausting and exciting and absolutely hilarious and every bit as much a part of me as everything else i've ever experienced. i know that much already, even though i have no idea what that will mean.

i wish that i were brave enough to believe. i was going to finish that sentence differently, but it finished itself. to believe what? to believe in what? i don't know. maybe just to believe that there's something to believe in.

i want to believe in the unbelievable. i want to remember the things my soul knew before there was me. or you. or anything we know of life."


yeah.