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I looked at my watch. He was still late. I took my guitar in my cold hands and determinedly wrote “Anticipation,” sitting on my bed.
Carly wrote this song while waiting for Cat Stevens to arrive
From the beginning, James and I were linked together as strongly as we were not just because of love, and music, but because we were both troubled people trying our best to pass as normal.
If James was suffering, his pain diverted my attention away from myself, the result being that I agonized about myself less.
Codependency
When James walked into a room—any room—he transformed it, charging it up with his radiance, his message of “I’m just passing through, but while I’m here, it’s the night before Christmas.”
Someone told me once that we are capable of loving only four people in our lives. Another person told me that human beings can love an infinite number of people. I’m more comfortable with the infinite-number theory, the crucial difference being the number of people I feel I can love well.
Then, overcome with the relief of having a friendly, familiar person in front of me, I blurted out suddenly, “Please—tell me something true, Juan, something to believe. And I will.” Whether it was the sangria, or the Valium, or the night, I could feel my eyes well up as Juan spoke in a gentle voice. It was love that leads all, he told me. It was love that knows what babies need. Love, he emphasized, knows all. God tells all men to know love, tells men to open their hearts, to be on the lookout for the secrets of the night. As for that Japanese woman, he went on—“She try to take your oosban
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I could control what I was seeing, but I no longer had to. It was in command. It had no competitors. It might not stick around permanently, it might come and go, and even vanish for long stretches of time, but I knew now, for certain, that it was there. In the light of the mirror, I didn’t look pretty, for sure—nor was that the point—but I did look fierce. In truth, I was staring the Beast in the eye. I held its gaze and I thought, Cool, God is in me.
Lovely God moment
Fame is manic and terrifying, especially when your identity and status become gradually and exclusively dependent on others’ opinions, jealousies, and rivalries.
When a marriage ends you don’t always get to choose what remains.
Just as night follows day, sadness follows joy, and the underworld sometimes takes aim at innocence, a lifelong nemesis like my stammering turned out to be the very thing that made my music crucial to me in the first place.
I move forward by incorporating whoever or whatever is missing or vanished into my very being, my body, my breath. The psychologists call this introjection, but I call it surviving.
James and I were like two maniacs posted at the gates of domesticity, feverishly going about preventing anything really comfortable from happening.
Sounds about right
