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Death Cab for Cutie - We Looked Like Giants

God bless the daylight
The sugary smell of springtime
Remembering when you were mine
In a still suburban town
When every Thursday
I’d brave those mountain passes
And you’d skip your early classes
And we’d learn how our bodies worked

This is my favorite Death Cab song and I don’t really like many Death Cab songs anymore, at the old age of almost 23. Whenever I hear this song, it instantly smells like winter to me, and when it smells like winter, I immediately think of this song. It reminds me of being 18 and only having classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays and driving to the mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee with my exboyfriend and camping. He even drove a gray subcompact. I hear this and I can see my awkward limbs in jeans and a black coat, my hair cut boyshort but pixieish then, little pieces of dark hair peeking from underneath my knitted hat, standing nearby as he built a fire, his gloves in the snow. I can see my breath as I look at the nearby mountains, seeming to lean in to whisper things that you can’t hear at sea level. Even there, physically so close, we were so far apart emotionally and I felt nothing but the dark confusion that colors everything at 18. I thought I loved him but I only knew how to love the idea of love unlike now when the opposite is true.

posted 3 months ago and tagged as death cab mountains glimpse
journaling september 7th: mountains

journaling september 7th: mountains

posted 6 months ago and tagged as journaling mountains september

journaling september 7th 5:23 pm

I woke up from dreams about mountains. Cliffs, hill, valleys, canyons. We seemed to be on a whirlwind tour of the world’s most beautiful mountains. Velvety green Alps, Shenendoah blue, the Rockies with snow on them. At each place, the same routine of me standing at the edge of a cliff while you take my photo. After you snapped it, you would swing the camera around your neck and reach your arms out for me before I began to look down and realize what this fall could do to me. Your hands on my waist, I’d step back onto solid ground and we’d move from the Rockies to Denali, which in this dream was a mere walk away.

We repeated this routine at every mountain range until it seemed that I was about to fall somewhere in the Pyrnees. I grabbed your outstretched hand but we both fell for what seemed like a very long time until we land in bed. We look at each other for a long time before we start undressing each other. You slide my t-shirt over my head as I unzip your pants. We’re skin to skin on the bed, your hands on my waist the way they were on those mountains earlier, and I feel closer to you than I have ever felt to anyone. I have run from safety, from home forever and you are that. When something is good, my instinct is to run but I’m here now and now you are holding me by the waist and showing me that this is good, this is home. I’m rewiring my brain and it’s happening slowly but surely. I am learning how to love, how to be happy, how to be. My dreams are way ahead of my brain it seems.

posted 6 months ago and tagged as journaling september mountains gt