i had to work today. at 7am. i'm so tired lately that everything is a blur and the only things that make it better are the shape of his face and the deep edge of a little espresso under the table, the always cold other side of the pillow and funny sunlit conversations on the most unlikely of days. there are some records we listen to so hard that we can't hear them anymore. they get thick with meaning and moments, dense with images and ideas that weren't there before we started. _still feel gone_ is one of those records. and as i left work today, half an hour after i was supposed to, a little pent up and tired and every cell of my being desperate to just be closer to him, (desperation, what a dangerous term), i got in the car like i always do, in my skintight black leggings and my black on black chuck taylors, covered in steamed and dried milk, mocha powder, whatever the fuck else i and everyone else managed to drop on and around my feet for the last week, i looked in the rear view mirror, in the sunglasses i bought yesterday to soothe what can only be described as loathing dissatisfaction with just about everything within those four walls and then some, i needed to go somewhere. now, this edgy need to run away is normal. i live with it every day. i want to run, screaming, in the other direction, at most moments. but i've also learned that when i get to where i was running, i'd like to start running again. so, i've found ways to run while standing still, to keep it in the same state, hell, the same zip code, and still satiate the need. today, i needed to go, and i needed to look at something i hadn't seen in a while, something wide open, full throttle, gorgeous. something entirely different from the way i looked, the way i felt. i threw the volvo in gear, thumbed across the ipod, and landed on a place i haven't been in a very, very long time. i fucking love uncle tupelo. i love wilco. i love son volt. i am the rare breed of woman who, a. knows who all three of those bands are, and b. hasn't picked a side in that argument. but hey, jeff and jay are off of drugs, and so am i, so can't we all just get along? I refuse to pick a side in the wilco / son volt argument that always happens, because i love _red-eyed and blue_ just as much as i dream of _windfall_ and there's just no picking in between. there is however, the eternal amalgam, the uncle tupelo. i had a momentary brush, and by momentary brush i mean full slam on i bought every single one of that bands records in a week, with listening to uncle tupelo somewhere near the beginning of college, when the boyfriend was older and a pilar of the alt-country movement, when it was important to me to know what absolutely everyone was talking about, and more so, it was paramount to understand the basis of the things that i listened to and was surrounded by. I fell in love with uncle tupelo but quickly forgot my momentary obsession for things further along in the progression, son volt records and wilco moments filled my cd shelves and i knew the tupelo was there, but i wasn't listening. it wasn't long before relationships got a little too serious and far too dangerous and mind altering movements were introduced in staggering doses and life got a little too violent. i found myself a few too many hundred miles north of home listening to my uncle tupelo records, sitting in the edge of a window above parkslope, pushing my swollen cheek against the cold slab of glass, listening to the sounds of home as brooklyn got a little smaller and life got jarred a little further out of focus every day. i can remember being laid out in the middle of the loft floor, staring at the ceiling and the hooks that he'd hung from the rafters for my art work, the air dense with spray paint fumes and loathing, every piece of furniture, clothing, jewelry, waiting to see what we'd do next, listening to Jeff Tweedy, "your heaven looks just like my hell". and when it was over, because things like that can never last, because someone gets broken or fed up or just plain gives up and gives in, and that's how it has to be, so no one dies. because desperate, disparate, uncomfortable, soul sucking lives are not the lives we should live, i put the records away and i didn't listen to them. the singles moved to seattle with him and i let him take the, i let him take them all, and i stopped buying vinyl, i stopped having to worry about the temperature in the apartment and i didn't even own a record player. i gave it up, because i had myself convinced that it was some sick extension of him, when in all reality i came into that deal with vinyl, with the record player, with a junkie's need to hear billy bragg at least once a week and a sincere disrespect for strictly-radio-top-40 listeners. i was already the audiophile, i just had a bad taste in my mouth. something about blood and metal will put you off from just about anything. so i moved. i got better, i got worse, i got different, i got unbent. i started buying the records again, i started laying in the sun and watching the vinyl glint in the grooves and swearing that analog still sounds better than digital (and it does). i remembered that i was one of them, and i'd date the hipsters who got my obscure pavement references and liked to lay on the roof with me and listen to tom waits. i got a job at a record store. i met him. and all of a sudden the tupelo was back. and it was fucking back to stay. it was months after months of _march 16-20_ because _wait up_ makes me think of him on every spin, it was every moment of heart break in every fight and every moment of misunderstanding in the waiting. no fail, if i play a guitar for more than twenty minutes, _moonshiner_ or something else from the catalog will get covered, and its never lost in a set list. its hearing _still be around_ five hundred different ways, like a spent daisy, he loves me, he loves me not, he loves me, he loves me not. it came up differently each and every time, half a petal here, half a heart there. when i hear that song i'm careening down the side of a mountain with tears streaming down my face, death grip on the shifter, trying to decide what to say, what to do, whether or not to care. i'm pulling up behind his car in the middle of the night and i'm leaning against his leg while i sit on the floor of our record store, looking up at him as i hide from everyone else. i'm in a borrowed bed with my hand in his, staring the future in the face and getting nothing more than a muted, misunderstood reflection. its dense and uncomfortable, like seeing the wrong ex for the first time in years. its a moment of oh fuck muscle memory and three fucking years of walking the line upside down. today i took the same route, down 220, through the mountains, up the edges and over the sides, kicking back over the parkway in high gear, the sun pressing against my tender skin and the treble nudging against my eardrums. it was fucking beautiful, the sun, the sky, the way the mountains seem to stretch their backs toward the sun and the south seems to go a little technicolor in warmer weather. and i listened to still feel gone from beginning to end, snatches of memory plucking at my soul from a distance, the happiness of seconds tempering the empty hopelessness of others. three years wrapped up in two voices and guitars. weighty, misunderstood history bleeding past every single note. i always swore if i met him i'd still be around. and i knew when i met him. i don't even think i knew, in that shit fuck what the hell is this new sticky suffocating god he's close i want to see those eyes every single day moment. i may still not really know. but its there, and i've stopped looking for it in places i know i won't find it. its there in the lyrics, in the melody, in the facial expressions and especially the silences. _I don't see you through the windshieldI don't see you in faces looking back at mealcohol doesn't have much that matters to saycan't imagine where you and time to kill will stay__when the bible is a bottleand the hardwood floor is homewhen morning comes twice a day or not at allif I break in two will you put me back togetherwhen this puzzle's figured out will you still be aroundto say you've just been therewalking the line upside down__walked and breathed many a cancerous milewhere the bat of an eye is too slow to beat the coffinthey won't tell it on the TVthey can't say it on the radiothey pay to move it off the shelf and into our mindsuntil you can't tell the truthwhen it's right in front of your eyes__when the bible is a bottleand the hardwood floor is homewhen morning comes twice a day or not at allif I break in two will you put me back togetherwhen this puzzle's figured out will you still be aroundto say you've just been therewalking the line upside down_