Your Apartment

It was as if lightning struck the sand. It built, the electric current, and it burnt when it touched the ground. There was momentum; it was exciting, but it scorched. This is how we ignited.

I thought only of you. Of myself. When I left your apartment, it was just you and I. There was no 'him' and there was no 'her'. And boy, was it real. I cast it all aside, the brokenness and the denial that could fully brew beneath the surface. The carelessness and disregard for my stable world - all of it safe, solid, common, and plain. He wasn't enough? No, I suppose not. I searched introspectively as I walked down your staircase, drunk on touch and smell... and you. Who was this person with her heart on her sleeve and her reasonable mind, her structure, her values, pushed away somewhere unreachable? It was a heavy bolt of a flash, the lightning we created. I craved its heat most of all, forgetting about every other element in its path.

And the next day, I went to his apartment. I became a sunken hole that had been previously filled with the old version of me; his version. I sat down to speak, and it was clear that I was a new me: a version of me that you'd helped to create. I peered around at the places and markings of his home that had once rendered me happy. I saw the time I shared with him like a movie reel, the whole of this person, and still I felt nothing. And so I left his apartment and never went back.

You felt tangible, you felt sweet. You were present in a world that hadn't seemed grounded or been kind to me before. But why? My insecurities were etched into my skin and there was a tugging on their strings. And I think that became the core of it. The lack in morality that deeply hurt another human was no match for you and your pull on the fragility of the etching. It was a sensational pull, and with it came an unstoppable force that drove me deeper into the vastness of our space and time. For me, there was no turning back.

Soon the backdrop of your apartment seeped into the forefront of my thoughts. It was you and all that embodied you and it represented comfort, warmth, laughs, and play. But it could only be to that extent. In a metaphor of many, when you bowled, you aimed at pins knowing that the round would clear and reset. You had that to fall back on. When I bowled, even with a clear strike, the pins never reset. And so I bowled into nothing. And that is how I spent my energy with you, fully aware that I invested into nothing, because there would forever be someone more important to you. A soul that always occupied your heart. I was just auxiliary. It was exhausting, and yet I continued to bowl.

And so the very last time I left your apartment, knowing that was the last I'd see of you, I heard a song that made me feel the entirety of it. The space of you and I, the reality outside of that, the past of him, the risk we both took. It was the perfect melody, soft but bating in the chorus. And when I hear it now, it reminds me of you and what could have been but never had the chance to come to fruition. As I play it now, I still wish desperately to be sitting with you alone, in our little world, forever, in your apartment.

Apartment, Young the Giant: