The Blower's Daughter...Damien Rice...

Have you ever heard Damien Rice's The Blower's Daughter?...

I just cried harder than I think I've ever cried in my life (I'm still crying) listening to that song...

It's the opening song to the movie Closer (a movie for which this song stands out as something really terribly sweet and authentic)...

I was realizing as I was listening to it...that it's been a long time since I've felt that way...

That totally, completely, without reservation or defense in love with a woman...

So in love that you don't even think about it...you just feel it...

It was the summer of 1997...

We made love on her best friend's bed...I peeled rose petals and made a path down to the bedroom of the house that we were housesitting...

And we made love...for the first time...and for her...the first time ever...

And it was the most beautiful night of my life, I think...

And it was the summer of 1998...when I went to go live with her in Washington, D.C...and we spent almost every waking moment together...we worked together...we lived together...we did literally everything together...I don't think we spent one day or night separate that summer...

We worked together at the B'nai B'rith...and we would go picnic together on our lunch break in the park in the middle of town...

She'd bring bagels and yogurt and some fruit maybe...maybe a sandwich for me, since I still ate meat, at the time...

And we just sat in the middle of the park...and I was so in love...and I totally took it all so much for granted...

I can't stop crying...

I don't think that I've ever felt so completely open to the world...

So completely idealistic...

So completely in love...

"I can't take my eyes off of you...I can't take my eyes off of you...I can't take my eyes off of you...I can't take my eyes off of you...I can't take my eyes off of you...I can't take my eyes off of you"...

We went to this really great presentation by Cornell West, the radical, social democratic, and deeply spiritual black scholar and committed poverty advocate, and the Reverend Eugene Waters, the more liberal/conservative Boston preacher who both led the effort by black ministers to embrace President Bush's Faith Based Initiative and who has helped reinvigorate efforts to seriously improve Boston's inner cities...

"I can't take my mind off of you...I can't take my mind off of you...I can't take my mind off of you...I can't take my mind off of you"...

Do you know what is saddest for me...

The part that breaks my heart worse than anything else...

It's not breaking up...that was hard enough...

But that's not it...

It's that I think she's given up...

I think this girl that to me symbolized everything that was/is amazing...beautiful...idealistic...hopeful...noble...

...good...great...

...about the world...

I'm concerned that she's just given up...

That for whatever fucked up reasons...

That she's just turned her back on everything that was great about her...

That was AMAZING about her...

That's she's just slowly...

Given up...

And it makes me so sad...I can't even describe it...

It pains a place inside me that is so deeply offended that the gods have taken away someone who was destined to lead mere mortals out of the dark recesses of their poor, pathetic, cynical souls...

"I can't take my mind off of you...I can't take my mind off of you...I can't take my mind off of you"...

That's what makes me saddest...

That's what makes me cry so deeply today...

A cry that's reminiscent for me of the cry that my father gave the day that he learned that my mom had left...and that we all shared with him on his bed the night that we learned that she was gone...me, my sister, Liz, and my sister, Jenny...

This deep guttural cry that tells you that there's something seriously wrong in the world today...

That she may have given up...even if just for a time...

Because the world needs her...that's for goddamned sure...

I tell everyone...

You'd just have to know her...

And it's true...

If you met her...

Especially in those summers of 1997 and 1998...

You'd see what I mean...

She was so alive...I was so alive...

So completely full of purpose...

So completely trusting of the world...

And no reason to think otherwise, really...

I miss her...

"I can't take my mind off of you...I can't take my mind off of you...I can't take my mind off of you...I can't take my mind off of you"...

I haven't felt the way this guy so clearly feels in this song in a long time...

And it was such a good time...

I remember spending nights browsing the book stores...

Debating whatever ideas or events were on our minds, at the time...

Whatever was going on, at the time...

Whatever we happened upon...

I was falling in love with Brandi and with ideas all at the same time...

For me...

They were the same love...

Because so much of the romance I had/have with ideas came out of my romance with Brandi...

The feeling of being with another human being like they are always the warm place in from the cold, dark night...

The feeling that the world is opening up in front of you...and you witness it through the eyes of someone you think of as an extension of you, so closely do you breathe the same breath...

You think their thoughts are yours, they're so closely entwined...

Have you ever believed in the world so completely?...with no reservation...no danger...no concern for anyone or anything other than this one person that you want to spend every waking moment with...

Have you ever been that in love?...

Damien Rice has...you can tell...

I have, too...

But it's been a long time...

And I miss it something terrible...

I miss you, Brandi...I love you, hon...

Love,
Ben

Epilogue (to the grieving in that post)...

The more I think about it...the more I think that Brandi just got stuck...where I moved forward...and it's just sad...because I don't know if I've seen her stuck like this...we always moved forward together...or at least that's the way it always seemed to me...and now I just think she's stuck...or just exploring at a different pace than me...

Either way...

I miss her...