Complications in the great design...

Sometimes, I put on my headphones and turn the volume up as loud as it will go, and listen to Regina Spektor's 'Oedipus'.  The song makes me cry because of my relationship with my mother and how it's about feeling unloved and unimportant.

I close my eyes and remove myself from wherever I am.  In the car, or at the beach or on the patio, and I place myself somewhere pleasant. 

Back when I was little and I had this grand perspective of everything.

When I admired my parents' assumed perfection and thought the world was a happy place.  When I didn't know about death and how people lived. 

When I was completely oblivious to the fact that my family was broken and that my father was out of work and just put on a suit everyday to look for a job while we were on welfare. 

Back...

...way back...

when I had no idea how bad things were, and that hearts got broken.

Back, when my mother treated me like a child, that she loved, and not some sort of reject, or 'felon' wrongly accused of every type of rebellion.

I create a whole new world.  Whatever sensations I feel in this one I place in the other.

The heat of the sun becomes the warmth of my parents' bed when I would climb in with them to watch the news, before they stopped sleeping in the same room.

The sound of thunder and rain takes me back to the times when I would sit in the picture window with my family and watch the lightning like fireworks across the night sky.

It's powerful. To go back.

But when I return I realize...

...what I'm missing and how badly I want it back, like in the song that blocks out the pain of the world I'm in so I can recreate my past.  Back when I was naive enough not to know pain.

But it only lasts the 5 minutes and 45 seconds that I can hide in the song.