Songs That Make You Cry: Readers Respond
Schumann &mdash About Foreign Lands and Peoples
When I believed in God, I wondered how I could love him &mdash or anything &mdash more than my parents. At four this seems impossible. I conjured love of the unknown, but it . This failed, and the failure issued from me my first, secret shame.
One ritual of this time was Milo & Otis, a children's movie about a pug and kitten who quest to reunite and return home. My obsession with the movie amplified with time, as my mother told me Milo & Otis stories &mdash long, detailed, often raucously funny furtherings of the duo's adventures &mdash every night before I fell asleep. She tells me I was a harsh critic ("Try again") and I shrug &mdash editors are born, not made, Mom.
Times change. At twelve, God left, puberty hit and desire entered like an uninvited houseguest. Milo & Otis were out of the picture. My parent's desperation, no longer concealed, smothered me like a flannel blanket. I grew &mdash and didn't grow &mdash as a typical adolescent; I entered, awkwardly, the living world; anger and lust blotted me out in their dispassionate violence. And then, not long ago, I found myself incapable of love.
Is it surprising that the movie's piano theme is the one thing to bypass the glaciers, guard dogs and brittle embankments protecting my soft spot? Music is dead to me as it was sixteen years ago. This song's simplicity contrasts with the riot of my ego and my miserable anima. It evokes the tender sensibility of youth, the open soul, a God and a joy no longer mine. Love haunts me in a past I can neither recapture nor forget.
One does not need a church, a war or a President to lose the will to live, only resignation. And yet, it is impossible to divest from meaning as one shakes out a raincoat. Our dreams may be unsatisfied but they refuse to die; immortal fantasies, incommensurate with existence, bloom only in the moment of speechless meditation. And the moment passes.
Elizabeth Benefiel edits this zine. Her work has appeared in The Onion and other fine publications. She lives in Berkeley, California with fifty-nine other young women.