SPECIAL GUEST BLOGGER! MAID MOSEPHINE on Paper Airplanes, “PDA” (2007)

PDA – Paper Airplanes 

*Click that little green link above to hear the song. Then, click on that little arrow thing at the Lala website to hear the song. I promise to get the actual track up here as soon as I can so you don’t have to go through those steps.

[Eds. note: This blog post is brought to you by Erin Murphy, better known as musician Maid Mosephine. Her band, The Equines, just released a great new EP called Hearts on Faces. You can listen to it here... http://theequines.bandcamp.com/album/hearts-on-faces.]

I remember this song.  It’s the one where the piano moves faster than my feet, walk-running around the too-suburban neighborhood in southern Illinois while chasing a physical ideal papier-mashed to my forehead by someone else as the balloon holding its shape and my own dreams deflates.  I’d run, I’d walk, and the pace of the buildup lay somewhere in the middle.  It’s fuzzy, the details. The only ones that live on are in the stories I’ve told; somewhere along the line I unconsciously resolved to tell them over and over until I became bored with the reactions.  The contempt, the disgust, the pity.  Good stories aren’t always happy.  Damn it.

I stare into a long-extinguished fire, fishing in the dark for the matchbook.  My confidence in my hand’s memory of shapes and sizes diminishes, and the bells ring.

“You cut in line to entertain the fools…”

I wanted to grow up too fast and walk down the aisle even after all my friends’ efforts to talk me out of it, even after that one night before we were engaged – all I wanted is to wake him up to make sure he made his curfew.  All his hands around my neck wanted were for me to stop talking.  After the minister signed the paper only our location changed.  Three years later he’s deployed and I’m at a nightclub by myself fourteen hundred miles from home, knowing I’ll find no one familiar but still cannot shake the compulsion to search. It’s playing in my car when I drive out of the parking lot, wondering how I will find the answer to all these damn adult problems before I fall asleep. One where I will find “steady fingers holding hands.”  One where I can stop apologizing for loving this song.

Only 27 minutes left until the computer dies.  Loud rustling startles me and I see the largest raccoon I’ve ever seen in my life.  I’m thinking I’ll probably be sitting in the dark for the rest of time, an easy target for rabid creatures.  How would I even defend myself?  Oh, the question of my life.

The drums come in, relegating the piano to the background, and I’m looking for my own apartment in the city while driving around in a car far too expensive for one person’s salary.  There’s something in the music that’s descending and ascending on side-by-side staircases, melody and decision meeting each other at the last second, before it’s too late to turn sunny-side up.

“It’s Sunday, 3 o’clock pm, ideal time for being alone” and I’ve finished my latest paper collage.  I watch my phone light up with an incoming call, the fifth reassurance I’ve received (today) of my decision not to give him my forwarding address.  I help Lucas up the stairs to his kennel, his cross-shaped scar shiny from a run-in with a truck months ago, before we met and became each others’ only hope.  The cries are dissonant but necessary as we both limp in very different ways.

“I guess we’re on our own own own cloud nine…”

I still feel the presence of the raccoon, and my throat grows tight.  At last resort I pull out my phone and use the light in search of the matches; they’ve been lying on the ground next to me all this time, a bit like my system for taking others’ advice.  I light one and throw it in the firepit with a childish hope that the soaked wood will magically ignite.

Alas.  These things take time.

Maid Mosephine’s band, The Equines, is tearing it up all over the suncoast of Florida. Go here: http://theequines.bandcamp.com/album/hearts-on-faces for a taste.