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Now I can try to explain.

I just finished reading Charlotte Sometimes by Penelope Farmer. It is a story of a girl who goes back and forth in time forty years trading lives and bodies with a girl similar to herself in a lot of ways but who is growing up in a boarding school during World War One. It is the book that inspired and is, in places, word for word the lyrics to one of my favorite songs of the same title by The Cure.

I got the book simply out of pure curiosity because the song means a lot to me and I had read somewhere that the lyrics were taken from it. I have always been starry-eyed over Robert Smith's writing and couldn't help but want to see what inspired him and if I felt the same about the book.

It is odd to me what thoughts and feelings I have had in the last few days while reading it. At first I thought that the song is really not about anything I felt or related to in the song and it was simply all about this girl and this story. It is an innocent story of just a young girl who is confused and scared flipping back and forth in time. By the time I reached the end of the book I realized that it is about everything I thought. It is very symbolic of what the song means to me, on a deeper existential level.

In a lot of ways Charlotte and Clare became one and the same, so much so that even Charlotte felt she didn't know if she could leave the world she was now so used to and go back to her own life. She had a little sister back in her old life but had in some ways formed new ties to Clare's younger sister whom she had grown to care about so deeply. Yet she longed so much for the familiarity of her real time and home.

When I came to the end of the story where Charlotte was reading the letter from grownup Emily and "cried for herself and the girl who died so many years ago" I realized why those words move me so much, when I hear them in the song. Charlotte was finally releasing all of the pent up fear and mourning and loss and everything she had been dealt and had lived with and worked through, but also she was mourning the loss of someone very special to her and someone that was forever a part of her. She mourned for the losses of loved ones of everyone she had grown to care about.

In so many ways my life, growing up, was such a blur of odd and scary memories and I spent so much time coping with trying to be a normal girl in a fucked up world. When I left home I left a note. It was swift and it was final and I left a younger brother who needed me because he really had no one else there to care about him. I left a baby sister that had, up to that point, been like my own child. Then I married and fairly quickly had my own family and things changed me. I couldn't stay in that world.

Leaving that behind and building a new life in unfamiliar places has eventually shaped who I am now and how I think, everything about me, I scarcely remember anything that was, or how it came to be that it is so different from how it should have been if it had all been normal to begin with.

I can't remember faces, have forgotten voices, even mourned death of people I love before they ever died simply because I know I will never see them again. I gave up relationships and moved to strange places where I have never really been permanent. Like Charlotte and Clare, sometimes I feel like am in some time warp or some other world where my memories are all blurry and confusing and sad.

So when I hear it, I cry for myself, the self I am now that didn't get to be that little girl, I mourn the little girl inside me who died so many years ago because of all of the grown up and seriously messed up things she had to live through and cope with. I mourn losing the memories of being her. I see me as a little blonde-haired blue-eyed girl in my two daughters but they are so different, from a different world. They are glass sealed and pretty. It is everything I didn't have. It is everything I have struggled to protect in them. It is everything I deserved.

I cry for the fact that I feel like my memories are of a stranger's life and not mine at all. How could I have been that girl? However, I am everything I am because I was her. I cry because I miss all the time I have lost. I cry because I am not really a Sister or a Daughter or a Grand Daughter or an Aunt anymore. Not really. Not like I should be. Not like I could have been.

I cry because I was almost a mother while still only a child. I cry for a life that never got a chance. I cry because no one else did. I cry because I was alone and lost. I cry for years of mistakes, my own and everyone else's. I cry for a hundred million reasons.

I cry because I try to stay disconnected yet am very deeply connected to all of those feelings at the same time and nothing I will ever do will change any of it or bring any of it back or make any of it different to begin with. I am in this time, in this life. I am just thankful for that. I survived. I am doing the best I can.

The song has always made me cry. Always.

Posted by gwendolyn on June 05, 2004 at 03:23 AM