Guster - Demons

We live in circles.

We leave to come back, mentally at least. I remember this feeling, It's a feeling I haven't had in a long time, and it's different. It's aged and more bitter, more understanding of the world thus more cautious of it. It's me sitting on the grass of my parents house looking out one year later. The kids are older, the park's changed, there is new asphalt on the basketball court and the children now have bike paths where I used to sit with my friends as a highschool sophomore and drink cheap vodka from Poland spring water bottles. It's a feeling of familiarity with change, for better or worse. You come back to something that is no longer there.

The bench where I wrote the lyrics to this song titled it takes three to tangle. It's a little more worn down, from the two months of record breaking North Jersey rainfall. The edges are splintered from the scraping of metal skateboard trucks from local adolescents with optimism in their hearts and flight in their minds. There's a new passage written in thick black marker that says "Our hearts are made out of strings to be pulled." It is the same bench where I felt that if I tied my shoes tight enough, I could fucking walk to Boston. This bench is a circle, it is the same but different, and in that sense it will always be the same but different.

We are circles. You are home, but you are not. The smell you grew up with, your fathers laugh, the smell of your mothers food, the little lamp in your room that gave the walls that familiar "when life gives you lemons, you paint that shit gold" hue to them. The wet grass in your backyard that you walk barefoot through in silence as you remember the time your father chased your ex boyfriend with a chainsaw. It is this that doesn't change, even if your heart has. Even if your home is the one you've made for yourself on dusty roads out of sticks and stones.

We are fireflies, and they are circles too. The act of us running as fast as we could over dandelion fields is now the memory of it. The firefly is no longer physical, but mental. We once sat in metaphorical jars where the distance never seemed farther than a few inches away from each other.

I hate coming back to the W section in my dvd collection and watching the robots dancing in space. I hate it because it is my favorite movie, but it's different now. It's seen with a view of remembrance and not bittersweet optimism. But we live in circles, we leave to come back, all that is the same will always be the same, but slightly skewed.

We've come back to this beach where we shared IPA's and ate boardwalk pizza. The ocean is as beautiful, the sand is as warm, and the lights are as bright on the marquee of the "Fried Oreos" stand, but the people have changed. We've died, we've divorced, we've been laid off. We've made new best friends and lost brothers and sisters, but we come back because we're looking for the comfort in familiarity, the things in a circle that do not change. I think once we all accept that things will change, we will gain and lose. Once we have almost completely broken... well after that we can come back and have a much better appreciation for whatever our circles are.

We live in circles, we need circles, and me and you are circles. Through the oceans, and streams, and bridges and beaches. Through the mountains and streets and bedrooms and Chinatown buses. Through the interstates and internet, phones and fed ex delivery trucks. We have passed in 16 months a lifetime of love and loss, and here we are once again, meeting again, for what will most likely feel like the first time we ever did. Much much different, but the same, and we are and always will be a circle.