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Saturday, January 28, 2012

Across the Sea: The Road More Traveled

This is Part 2 of a larger story, if this is news to you, you might want to make sure of read Across the Sea: The Untold Story to make sure you have all the background I want you too.  If you're just browsing, go ahead and scroll down and read the entry before this one, you odd time-traveler you.


I'll give it to you straight.  I never got with Lauren.  In fact, just a few days into summer vacation I called her up during a break in Driver's Ed to find out she was hanging out with the guy that would become her boyfriend soon thereafter.  I was kind of okay with it really.  I had a very passive regret about it, sure, but it was one of the more peaceful letdowns I've ever had.  Despite having made resolutions to hang out with each other over the summer, we never did.  That was kind of disappointing.

Even more disappointing was the fact that we didn't have any classes together Junior year.  We had a few of the same, yeah, but not together.  We really made an impressive effort to stay friends despite only seeing each other once or twice during the day.  She even came to one of band's shows, on what I came to find out was her 16th birthday.  Appropriately, I proceeded to serenade the hell out of her before a new song I'd written about exactly how our school made me feel.  It was little things like that, you know, singing Happy Birthday, that in hindsight tells me I actually did like her to some degree.  You tend to get brave with people you like.

I came to realize what an interesting relationship I had with Lauren.  We had this innate mutual trust of one another, and I feel like I just acted different towards her.  We were more like two people who had been friends for many years rather than just one.  She didn't respond to things like other people did, and even weirder, it was a mutual trait.  She was a friend you could tell pretty much anything, and likewise, they would tell you anything.  I wasn't so great at giving advice back then, but at least I knew when to say I had nothing.  There's not really a good word for it, since I wasn't into the whole "parallel universe existences" thing at the time. 

We competed a bit too, or at least she did subconciously since she sometimes reminded me when I did better than her.  I only occasionally heard about her successes.  More often I heard about the fallout from those successes, which came largely in the form of stress from people urging her to act on her successes in a particular direction in which she had little interest.  I think it was her personality and ability to do hard work that made them talk, in addition to the intensity of the success in question.  She never admitted it, but her abilities, with the exception of our English class, were well above mine.  This was solidified when she scored ground breakingly well on the PSATs.  That should have been my cue that hard work and perseverance in the face of doubt will fling you to the moon, but yeah, I'm no less of a slacker now than I was three years ago. 

Our high school was really a stressful place that made academic acheivement a must.  In some ways, it paid off.  In high school though, you don't know that it will pay off, since you haven't finished anything yet.  Stress was at its highest once winter break ended and the AP Exams, tests given as an opportunity for high school students to earn college credit, were in the same year you were.  Things only begin to let up in the middle of May, after the exams are over.  Finally, at least one sigh of relief could be breathed.  If you took two or more AP classes, it meant the rest of the year was going to be fairly easy, so weight was lifted for Lauren and I.  My band had had a show late in May, and since she ended up not being able to make it, I was supposed to get her a DVD of it...you know, since I could.

All of this begs the question...whatever happened to Pinkerton?  Well, quite simply, I'd moved on to other music and other albums.  Across the Sea was this silly little thing I used to think a long time ago.  My eyes had been on other girls all year.  Pinkerton was only something I listened to if I was depressed.

Okay, I'll give it to you straight.  I didn't listen to Pinkerton like before until June 1st, 2009.  On May 30, 2009, Lauren killed herself.

I didn't find out until the morning of June 1st, when I walked into school like everything was normal, and wondering what was going on when everyone around was crying.  Being on the low end of the social totem pole and thus near impervious to most gossip, I had no idea what was going on until I got it from the teacher.  I actually made it through school fine.  It was when I went home and listened to Pinkerton that it hit me.

I got a little upset during No Other One, and I was adding to my journal at the time to talk about my views on the event.  And then Across the Sea came on, and I made it through the first verse fine.  The chorus hit me like a fucking freight train though.  "Why are you so far away from me?  I need help and you're way across the sea."  Those are the lyrics in the chorus.  Lauren was farther away than she'd ever been, and I needed her help more than ever, and I had no idea why.  I sobbed my way through that song, feeling the crashes of guitar during the bridge, and quickly changing the words in the breakdown from "It's all your fault, mama, it's all your fault," to "It's all your fault, Lauren, it's all your fault." 

I never hated her though.  I just blamed her for the intense emotions I was feeling at the time.  I didn't blame her for what she did, because, I reasoned, I kind of wanted to do the same thing myself.  That was a theme in my thoughts and writings over the next few days, "It should have been me.  They had every reason to take me over her."  I knew why she did it, but I couldn't understand it.  I couldn't imagine her or anyone going that far now that it had actually happened.  Suicide was always just something you played around with to go to the extreme and back in your head. 

Needless to say, this was a huge event in my life.  Lauren was always so different from everyone else I'd ever met.  She was the most attentive person to me ever.  She was the first and sometimes the only to wish me a happy birthday, or to notice a new haircut.  Who was going to do it now?  And damn, i never did get her that DVD.  I was in good company though, since so many people were affected by what happened.  I wanted nothing more than to be there for them, so I was, and any chance I got I wanted to say something about my friend, so I did.  I could go on for volumes about what happened in those early June days, and in fact I have most of the time period written down in a notebook, so I'm not going to go into what suicide feels like right now.

There was still that song, Across the Sea though, and Lauren's death lit the song right up.  The chorus alone made its association with Lauren clear enough, but there was even more to it.  Anything about being Japanese in the song can be attributed to the idea of something being foreign, just like the way she made me feel when she was no longer in my life.  I spoke to starts like I was speaking to someone from Japan.  She, for whatever reason, wanted to know about me and my hobbies, and always mentioned things like my birthday.  In the second verse, Rivers goes on to talk about the very stationary his Japanese admirer wrote her letter on, and he gets a little obsessive, mulling over it many times.  The relation there is obvious.  I still have our facebook conversations archived, and if I ever lost them, I'd be pretty damn unhappy.  The verse ends with "and curse myself for being across the sea," and while I always cursed myself for being unable to confess how I really really felt about her, this line now has a double meaning as "and curse myself for not coming with you, or doing something to prevent you from leaving in the first place."

Then there's another chorus, and that breakdown, that epic breakdown that still represents the same thing and always will: the raw turmoil that tossed me around like a ship on waves.  The following lyrics abour Rivers trying to be a monk are kind of like me as a kid, really perfect and well behaved.  I keep the line "you see mom, I'm a good little boy" because well, my mother and I viewed the situation very very differently.  She was worried I'd follow suit, and while I kept saying I wanted to (in secret of course, so she wouldn't have known unless she effectively hijacked my diary) I always knew I had neither the guts nor the tools.  I wanted to keep feeling bad after Lauren died.  It's a weird magnetic effect that pulls you down when something like this happens.  You don't want to feel happy because then you'd think you haven't paid your dues or whatever.  So that line was always a testament of that scrape I had with my mom, which was, as I said earlier, all Lauren's fault for making me feel so intensely.

The last verse was the fight for normalcy that goes on inside a person trying to recover from something like this, though it also fits for someone who's looking to get big things out of love.  "So you send me your love from all around the world, as if I could live on words and dreams and a million screams oh, how I need a hand in mine to feel," however, has a ring to it that can also speak to the fact that anything less than the person coming back to life will not take the feelings away.  I had words from her, and I had dreams about her afterward, but I never had a hand in mine to feel...not that I would have anyway, since I hadn't before, but it's likely I would have went for something like that to make sure what I was feeling was real.  Even the "send me your love" line has relevance, since Lauren managed to have two friends that weren't even in the U.S.  Those who know me will grin at the fact that those two friends were from Canada and England.  That's right folks, everything has history.

Of course, I have to admit, a lot of this lyrical analysis is fairly modern.  It's all true, yes, but it's rare that I ever focus so intensely on lyrics.  No, Across the Sea captures my head perfectly on the topic.  Throughout my past, many songs have been attributed to old flames and people who've passed through my life, but Across the Sea has the strongest link to any person whatsoever, and that's partially because it just FEELS right, which is my musical bottom line.  You can sing whatever you want, but if the sound makes me feel the proper way, that's how I'll think about this song.

Back when I first heard it, I thought it was weird that I'd picked such a random song to associate with Lauren.  She's still not Japanese or anything, sure, but now there doesn't seem to be any song that fits her better.  Maybe it is just those lines in the chorus that get shouted out loud and are so true it hurts that makes it all fall into place, or maybe it is that the bridge and breakdown all perfectly nail the feel of an emotional rollercoaster.  Or maybe it has to do with a line I purposefully overlooked.  "I've got your letter, you've got my song." 

That's one line that certainly HAS changed, since no such song existed in mid-2008 when I first heard Across the Sea.  Arguably, by June 1st 2009, there was.  It was either Happy Birthday, or...well...the unfortunately ironic song I played afterward.  After everything changed, I didn't recognize either of those, and so, largely due to Across the Sea, I set out to write a song to exchange for her letter (which I guess are the memories and literal facebook messages I have from her).  Ironically, I'd written a song (or at least, a few lyrics) on May 30th called "Chasing Angels" which was weirdly about being alone.  But I set out to write something that would capture those feelings and say what everyone needed to.  I knew exactly the style I wanted to write in: full on Pinkerton.  And that's how the song Greatest Girl came to be.  Looking at it...it basically does one thing: everything that Across the Sea doesn't.

It's not that I couldn't tell Lauren's story, or at least, my story about Lauren, without Across the Sea, but to me, that's a different story altogether.  This is the story of the song, not the one it only augments.  It just so happens that this song tells its story in such a way that the proper attention is demanded of it.  Though I will sometimes talk of the friend who changed my life forever, this song is often left out of that story, even though it was the thing that really hit me and spawned all that I've written here.  Across the Sea has effectively ceased being a song for me, and has instead become a symbol of my memories of my friend, Lauren. 

Ladies and gentlemen....weezer.

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