Blog 21: Poison and Wine

This entry is actually inspired by a song called "Poison and Wine" by the Civil Wars, introduced to me by the illustrious David Hagerman. It's one of those songs that will indisputably put your heart in knots. The main line is "I don't love you, but I always will." And being that a song, when poignantly well-written, can put me through a year's worth of emotion in the few minutes it plays, I felt like I needed to write something. I think there are some things we just don't ever let go of, losses that we will mourn intermittently for the rest of our lives. I've had loved ones die, and that is difficult, but death is a part of life. Sometimes I think the hardest losses are the intimate friends who drift away for whatever reason--physical distance, a falling out of some sort, just the little complications of life. Nothing like that marked separation to make you see that friendship or relationship as unreachable bliss. And just like in the song, we deny that it holds power over us when deep down, we know that those people have become elements of our innermost selves that will never be removed.


Nights like this, I find myself happy with the way my life is going, but still wondering what it would've been if all my original plans hadn't come crashing down. I find myself longing for the old faces and hands that populated my days, well, back in the day. And maybe I'm wrong--I hope I am. Maybe one day things will all work out in a manner that supplants my old dreams. Maybe new visages will break my habit of searching for the old ones. I don't really know how it works. I've not found all that I am destined to find, I guess, and sometimes I wonder if all these events were actually supposed to happen or if things just went terribly wrong. Every once in awhile, I daydream that it'll all come full circle. Other times I just like to believe that someday I won't feel like I'm settling for the next best thing.


Hindsight is 20/20, as cliched as that saying is. And every once in awhile, I can't help but look back and try to figure out how to put all the shreds of paper back together into the storybook pages they once made. If I don't have what I wanted (and sometimes still yearn for), it might just mean I was never supposed to grasp it in the first place, and though it have the appeal and taste of the finest wines, I'd fall dead with poison on my lips. That sounds a bit dramatic, I suppose. Just trying to tie in the title and how it made me think. Do we ever stop desiring things that we used to dream?