From the recording Chiaroscuro
The last straw for me was him saying, “This is going to be harder for you than it is for me” after I told him I needed to take a break from our friendship. The first straw was him saying, “You’re not physically attractive.” So, there was this emotional earthquake, and I was standing in the rubble of what I thought could have been an amazing building and started questioning whether or not I could be attractive enough for anyone. It got to the point where I would look in the mirror and think, “Maybe he’s right.” What shook me so much about hearing that is because I’ve been so used to people being satisfied with seeing me as a physical object. So, I wondered, if I don’t have the physical, then what do I have to offer? The aftershocks came every time I replayed those words. The lyrics here are somewhat intentionally galimatias, and I made them such as a way to express, lyrically, the confusion we experience when people say hurtful things. Thankfully, that was more than a year ago now, and the shaking has long since stopped.
Lyrics
His earthquake shook me like a roller coaster
on his one inch trick, well, maybe two at most.
Oh, yeah but everybody knows
it’s not that kind of show.
Then it stopped just long enough
for me to brace myself
for the eventual aftershocks
Six feet under with a hole in one
when I mistook his smile for a smoking gun.
He said, “You must be on
something stronger than ibuprofen.” I call it, “How-to-ruin-everything-in-just-one-month.”
Oh yeah, and here it comes,
ready or not.
If I held on more tightly, could I
stop this from shaking?
A 2-bit maybe had a hammer tongue,
and he was banging out my heartbeat
on a broken drum.
I said, “I won’t take this for long.”
How did he respond?
“A buffet trophy for my ego shelf,” he said,
“you’re hot dressed as a hole,
but not as anything else.”
A slut shamer bottomed all the way to the top
of his imaginary friend. The fashion cop
said he was down for more, but
Blue Book said he wasn’t worth that much, and
so we all cashed out when Midas lost his touch.
Oh yeah, and here it comes
ready or not.
If I held on more tightly, could I
stop this from shaking?
A part-time sandwich with a sticky spread. Yeah, but he looked like “someone” with a capital ‘S’. You know, I had a hunch
once that he would make the perfect mess,
and so I went for broke no matter what he said
oh yeah, and here it comes,
ready or not.
If I held on more tightly, could I
stop this from shaking?
Picking up the pieces since his insurance
refused to pay for any of the damages done