Better Be Quiet Now

wish you gave me a number
wish i could call you today,
just to hear a voice.
i got a long way to go
getting further away.

if i didn't know the difference,
living alone would probably be ok.
it wouldn't be lonely.
i got a long way to go
getting further away.

a lot of hours to occupy it was easy
when i didn't know you yet,
things i'd have to forget.

but i better be quiet now,
i'm tired of wasting my breath
carrying on, getting upset.

maybe i have a problem,
but thats not what i wanted to say.
i prefer to say nothing.
i got a long way to go
getting further away.

had a dream as an army man with an order
just to march in my place
but a dead enemy
screams in my face

but i better be quiet now,
i'm tired of wasting my breath
carrying on, not over it yet.

wish i knew what you were doing.
why you want to do it this way.
so i can't go the distance,
i got a long way to go,
i'm getting further away.
i got a long way to go
getting further away.
-elliott smith

I should be writing a paper on memory.

I've been thinking about this movie I watched called The Squid and the Whale. I watched it with my brother Danny, and although Josh wanted to sit with us and watch it, we quickly realized why that wasnt going to be a good idea. Far worse than exposing him to mouth-watering sex scenes or gut-wrenching episodes of physical torture, we would have been exposing him to a greater murderer of innocence: the death of family. This movie took on a great challenge in portraying the disintegration of one family because of the shame that is inherent in this type of story. For me, this movie captured the shame of two people failing their children.

As I've only been on one side of the relationship, I paid the most attention to the events from the child's perspective, (from which it was shot) and it made me remember what I went through, and how I felt. This blog isnt really going to be a movie review, like I've somewhat started... I don't feel like doing that right now. And it's not really going to capture my own feelings about having been in that situation. I guess I'm just writing because the movie hasn't left my mind now for two weeks.

The movie wasn't great. And the experience of the two boys, isn't exactly the experience I had. But the shame at being exposed to the sexuality of your parents, the desire to comfort parents who share too much, and the effect that those experiences and so many others have on your own ideas about love.

Parents love their children unconditionally, and bear burdens and suffer all sorts of ingratitude, but in this circumstance, children are made to bear the burdens of their parents and to a degree they want to, out of love. But that is not what children are, and should not be.

I couldn't expose josh to that. I'd do anything to save him from that, and I don't know that I could answer any of his questions.