Killing me softly with his song
I’m still watching In Treatment, even though tonight, finishing one disc, I felt like throwing the whole thing out the window. How to tell when you are done watching other people’s problems – when you get sick of them. I watched the first episode with the woman who gets pregnant but never wanted to be a single mother (um, thanks); I watched the cancer patient whose hair is about to all fall out (the woman at Tin’s swimming who showed up bald like me a few weeks ago has her hair growing back – I realize I’m not supposed to be jealous because she has/d cancer and she could die, but can I help it if I can’t help staring at her new growth, with envy?); I watched the young boy who is living through the break up of his parents and overeating (that’s what kids do) (as I sit there eating a bag of rice crackers for dinner and drinking left over white wine); I watch the corporate executive who loses his job and tries to kill himself (to the bone); and then I watch the therapist go to therapy himself and try to reconcile the father he lost with the father he has become (as I sit in my living room with my son sleeping at his other house).
An ex told me that divorce is the best kept secret because you get to have time off from your kids. That was reiterated to me recently by a well intentioned person who told me to enjoy the time I have apart from Tin. I’d not going to reply to either one of these for fear of what I might say.
What makes life work like this – in clichés – damaged people inflicting more damage upon more damage. I spoke with someone about her family … split by geography triple times till you have sliced the family so thin it is a razor that makes them all bleed. I spoke to a woman whose father caused them to go into the witness protection program only then they had to escape again and went into hiding on their own. Imagine the lives of these children, these people – the hunted then the haunted.
Or how about the life of this child: a father with a questionable medical license who commits insurance fraud often enough to support a gypsy lifestyle so that the kid(s) is raised in hotels in other countries, always on the run. A father who swears he is going to get in the car and take off anytime there is a heated argument (read: there is always a heated argument). A mother who recreates the house the same way with each move so that it appears nothing has changed as she hides her vodka in bottles of bleach under the sink.
This child – watching other people’s lives on TV as a grown up – lives that always seem to reflect back on being this child.
Don’t run from your karma, she says not in jest, ha, how could I? There is no place to hide.
he sang as if he knew me
In all my darkness fair
and then he looked right through me
as if i wasn’t there
and he kept on singing
singing clear and strong
Strumming my pain with his fingers
Singing my life with his words
killing me softy with his song
killing me softly with his song
telling my whole life
with his words
killing me softly with his song