"The Ways That God Speaks" or "The Clampdown"

I have this weird psychic connection with music sometimes. There are these moments, these tiny little flecks of the universe that travel through my radio when I'm least expecting it and the universe talks to me. It reveals something. Tells me what I need to hear.

When I was in highschool, I was driving to the Barnes&Noble in my town that I knew this boy frequented often. I knew that he didn't like me, and I knew that the night he kissed me the week before prom was silly and he had been drunk and it hadn't meant anything. And yet I was skipping a movie date with friends, and avoiding homework to drive to the bookstore with the slight chance that he might be there. I was a silly 17 year-old. On the way there, as I waited at a traffic light, my car quieted down enough for me to hear the song playing off a Dashboard Confessional CD I had playing low. The lines "No one is waiting for you" repeated over and over again, and I turned off the music. It was right. He never showed, but my heart skipped a beat every time I saw headlights park out front.

Again, within this past year, yet another problem with the men in my life. This one I'd been going back and forth over, questioning myself and pulling back, moving forward, questioning judgment and changing my mind. I didn't know what I was doing or even how I felt, but I knew it wasn't good and I was unhappy. Again, I turned up the music at a redlight on the way to his house, and the radio played this time. The end of a song by "All American Rejects" where the line is repeated, "It ends tonight. It ends tonight." I listened, and it did.

And now, tonight. Several weeks of completely overwhelming activity. Schoolwork piling up, extra-curriculars filling to the brim and overflowing, my eyes welling up in the daytime with the sting of feeling like a failure. Not even to go into the emotional tightrope I've been walking recently with strange sorts of crushes, confusing kisses, phone calls from boys in Illinois, proposals, and sad boys who beg for me back, sometimes my heart has to remind me that I promised to leave it alone for a while. This week, albeit only Tuesday, it seems I'm caught in the trash compactor from Star Wars- my greatest fear growing up as a child. The walls close in on both sides and there's no where to go but dead. Tonight I finished French homework, only to be kept awake by the pain in my leg that I can not subdue with heavy painkillers because then I won't be able to wake up at 6AM to get to school early and finish my art project by 1PM. I start music playing, but mute it while I write in my planner, and I turn in back on to hear the Clash just yelling at me:

"The voices in your head are calling
Stop wasting your time, there's nothing coming
Only a fool would think someone could save you"

Now what am I supposed to make of that? Do I want to know?

I'm praying myself to sleep tonight.

<3gen