There was a girl, and she spent a long time invested in someone hopeless. (I was having a sweet fix/ of a daydream of a boy/ whose reality I knew/ was a hopeless to be had) Things hurt. He told her she could stay, and then turned his back (you fondle my trigger/ then you blame my gun). It took her a long time, but eventually she realized that it wasn't that HE was hopeless, it was that THEY were hopeless. So she tried to ignore it. The warmth, that is. (I want your warm/ but it will only make me colder/ when it's over) But the warmth followed the girl all the way to Vancouver, Washington, at which time she realized that the warmth was different from what she first thought. This warmth isn't love, she realized. She wrote, and read (hail to the pages turning).
And then he calls her, he does, to tell her that he is still the same person he was before, with a new hat on. She loves the new hat, she tells him that the hat is just right for him. This hat, she whispers to pictures she took of herself as a child, is something he never told me he wanted. He asks her questions and the answers are the overflow, so she answers the best she can (whatcha looking at me for/ I'm no good at math).
And in this moment, she thinks of him, perhaps in the way she will continue to think of him in days to come. His subtle plea, the sound of consideration inside his voice, his hands when they were tender and soft, his eyes dewed with longing for something beautiful. The feeling of his warmth. Regardless of how long it took for her to discover it, the feeling of his warmth. Not the warmth she requires from a lover, nor the warmth from a father. The warmth she requires from him. Only him. This is the July of their experience together. Break down the barriers of pain and suffering, because they have made it beyond. She is ready to help (so be it, I'm your crowbar/ if that's what I am so far). She can't cradle this warmth between her arms when she needs a friend, or hold onto it between her legs when she's feeling lonely. She can't even hold it in her brain as "the way it was." It's just the way it is.
This brings the girl something she's been needing. The overflow doesn't leave her the way she thought it would. It's not converted, she doesn't think. It's not gone, either. How to describe where this overflow has gone is something she does not know how to do. She thinks that it is UP. The overflow did not fall, or spill off her, or turn into bread. It perhaps became steam, off her head in a cold morning, or out the sides of her lidded pot (I wished on the lidded blue flames/ and I wished for you) and turned from a wish into a (strand to climb/ a little hope). For herself, you see? Dear reader, for herself, hope for her own heart-hat.
(many thanks to Fiona Apple for the lyrics included in this blog)
