love is not a victory march.
Because Angie said, “One day we need to write your Jacob with my Anne.” All for you, doll.
Sure, people are getting better;
People are okay.
But then we send our children running towards the future,
As if the future is gonna to be the place to be.
- “People Are Getting Better” by Shane Koyczan
one. melting wax and loosened strings
He had lived his life believing that life itself moved forward : that the present followed the past, and the future followed the present. History is an arrow shooting forward, progression is key. It’s America in the twenty-first century, and Jacob is the modern man/boy/wolf/whatever. Hey kids, you can be whatever you want to be. Sky’s the limit.
He possesses boundless optimism, the last gift from his mother besides good looks and a faded red blanket. He’s not like the sad people in the plays he has to read in school, more poetry than dialogue, people trapped in shoe boxes and tiny apartments and coffins, locked into worlds of dreams and memories and regrets, leading lives of quiet desperation.
Jacob is different. He lives in the present. He knows how to laugh.
Bruce Springsteen (another motorcycle riding brother, leather jacket and badassery, screaming his lungs out over an electric guitar about going broke and losing jobs and leaving behind his wife and kids to shack up with some broad in a bar) runs in circles in Jacob’s head, singing about glory days, they’ll pass you by, glory days, and Jacob says, “Sure, sure,” because he believes it but he doesn’t really believe it, that at some point in your life you stop looking forward and start looking backward, that the rest of your life can recede like the tide from a single star point, a moment that blazes and makes everything fade in comparison.
He makes a vow to himself : I am never going to live like that.
(Something his mother should’ve told him, but she died before she got the chance, or maybe she died before her own optimism was robbed from her :
Those who soar the highest have the farthest to fall.)
two. she’s hollowed my chest and i’ve haunted her street
There’s a girl - no, not like that, don’t look at Jacob like that.
The name Bella Swan is like scar tissue : the weight of the skin is numb and dead, but its very presence is a reminder that you can’t feel now but you could feel then. How does this make you feel?
There’s a girl and her name is Anne but he doesn’t think of her as a girl, or maybe it’s just that Bella herself is a brand new species of woman, completely separate from the rest of the race. That would explain a lot. A brand new species that has no sense of self-preservation.
Anne does, though. Her shoulders hunch in like a miserable cat’s, like she’s trying to protect herself from a rough wind, as if it any moment she’s bracing for an attack, ready to be hurt. Waiting for it. Expecting it.
There’s a wedding, Sam and Emily’s, and it’s noisy and real, not like some other wedding (that Jacob sees in the space behind his eyelids, like a phantom), all prissy and cold flowers and calligraphy name cards and tasteful music. This wedding is more like bare feet scratching the grass, watermelon stains, kids running around shrieking, people getting icing on their noses, drunken karaoke and this (not a girl) person Anne, trying to retreat from it all.
He hasn’t seen her talk, really talk, to another person all night, and it’s curiousity that gets the best of Jacob in the end (but wait, the best of him is already gone. Guess who took it with her when she decided to die?)
Or maybe it’s just because she seems as broken down as himself, as out of place, or out of time, even though - he belongs here. His brothers tell him he belongs here, and their voices are the only thing that really keep him steady these days. Anne doesn’t belong, he guesses; she’s just the twin sister of the newest pack brother Alan, the one on the mic right now, singing, “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?” a la The Wedding Singer. He’s doing a terrible job of it, but he makes up in volume what he lacks in tonality.
“Hey,” he says. Jacob’s always been friendly, always been attracted to the messed up, the dismantled, the out of place. He just never thought that he would belong to this category himself, one day.
It’s all out of curiousity, and another thing his mom didn’t tell him, something about curiousity and killing and cats.
When he speaks to her, Anne makes a soft, startled sound in her throat. Almost a mew.
three. and this little masochist is lifting up her dress
There’s no moving forward and there’s no moving back.
Jacob’s life - his real life, the life where he knew how to smile and knew how to fix things and knew how to fight for what he wanted and knew that the sun would come up the next day even if you couldn’t see it for all the clouds - ended the day that Bella kneeled by his bedside and told him that you can love and love and love and love, you can give your life to love, you can became a slave to it, break bones and crush vessels and swim through oceans and climb mountains for it, become a monster and kill for it, and it still might not be enough to save the things that really mattered. The only thing. The only person.
He spent days, months, years, running towards Bella Swan, and when she’s gone, he loses momentum. He falls back on inertia.
Inertia brings him to Anne.
Their first kiss is just a drifting forward. He lets the weight of his own failures carry him towards her, covers her mouth with his so he can’t hear her crying. She says Jacob like she knows every shitty thing that he’s done in life, every single mistake and pettiness and accidental rage and wound he’s inflicted, every single cold silence that he’s allowed to go on ten seconds too long.
There’s a kind of comfort in being with something who asks for nothing. Jacob’s already given everything (the best years of his life, all internal organs, eternal devotion, and a little something that some philosophers might call his soul) to that bitch goddess Love.
Their relationship is one of restful silence and empty hands. They don’t look at each other, but out towards the sea.
Anne doesn’t ask for anything. So he gives her nothing, in return.
end.
Sure, people are getting better;
People are okay.
But then we send our children running towards the future,
As if the future is gonna to be the place to be.
- “People Are Getting Better” by Shane Koyczan
one. melting wax and loosened strings
He had lived his life believing that life itself moved forward : that the present followed the past, and the future followed the present. History is an arrow shooting forward, progression is key. It’s America in the twenty-first century, and Jacob is the modern man/boy/wolf/whatever. Hey kids, you can be whatever you want to be. Sky’s the limit.
He possesses boundless optimism, the last gift from his mother besides good looks and a faded red blanket. He’s not like the sad people in the plays he has to read in school, more poetry than dialogue, people trapped in shoe boxes and tiny apartments and coffins, locked into worlds of dreams and memories and regrets, leading lives of quiet desperation.
Jacob is different. He lives in the present. He knows how to laugh.
Bruce Springsteen (another motorcycle riding brother, leather jacket and badassery, screaming his lungs out over an electric guitar about going broke and losing jobs and leaving behind his wife and kids to shack up with some broad in a bar) runs in circles in Jacob’s head, singing about glory days, they’ll pass you by, glory days, and Jacob says, “Sure, sure,” because he believes it but he doesn’t really believe it, that at some point in your life you stop looking forward and start looking backward, that the rest of your life can recede like the tide from a single star point, a moment that blazes and makes everything fade in comparison.
He makes a vow to himself : I am never going to live like that.
(Something his mother should’ve told him, but she died before she got the chance, or maybe she died before her own optimism was robbed from her :
Those who soar the highest have the farthest to fall.)
two. she’s hollowed my chest and i’ve haunted her street
There’s a girl - no, not like that, don’t look at Jacob like that.
The name Bella Swan is like scar tissue : the weight of the skin is numb and dead, but its very presence is a reminder that you can’t feel now but you could feel then. How does this make you feel?
There’s a girl and her name is Anne but he doesn’t think of her as a girl, or maybe it’s just that Bella herself is a brand new species of woman, completely separate from the rest of the race. That would explain a lot. A brand new species that has no sense of self-preservation.
Anne does, though. Her shoulders hunch in like a miserable cat’s, like she’s trying to protect herself from a rough wind, as if it any moment she’s bracing for an attack, ready to be hurt. Waiting for it. Expecting it.
There’s a wedding, Sam and Emily’s, and it’s noisy and real, not like some other wedding (that Jacob sees in the space behind his eyelids, like a phantom), all prissy and cold flowers and calligraphy name cards and tasteful music. This wedding is more like bare feet scratching the grass, watermelon stains, kids running around shrieking, people getting icing on their noses, drunken karaoke and this (not a girl) person Anne, trying to retreat from it all.
He hasn’t seen her talk, really talk, to another person all night, and it’s curiousity that gets the best of Jacob in the end (but wait, the best of him is already gone. Guess who took it with her when she decided to die?)
Or maybe it’s just because she seems as broken down as himself, as out of place, or out of time, even though - he belongs here. His brothers tell him he belongs here, and their voices are the only thing that really keep him steady these days. Anne doesn’t belong, he guesses; she’s just the twin sister of the newest pack brother Alan, the one on the mic right now, singing, “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?” a la The Wedding Singer. He’s doing a terrible job of it, but he makes up in volume what he lacks in tonality.
“Hey,” he says. Jacob’s always been friendly, always been attracted to the messed up, the dismantled, the out of place. He just never thought that he would belong to this category himself, one day.
It’s all out of curiousity, and another thing his mom didn’t tell him, something about curiousity and killing and cats.
When he speaks to her, Anne makes a soft, startled sound in her throat. Almost a mew.
three. and this little masochist is lifting up her dress
There’s no moving forward and there’s no moving back.
Jacob’s life - his real life, the life where he knew how to smile and knew how to fix things and knew how to fight for what he wanted and knew that the sun would come up the next day even if you couldn’t see it for all the clouds - ended the day that Bella kneeled by his bedside and told him that you can love and love and love and love, you can give your life to love, you can became a slave to it, break bones and crush vessels and swim through oceans and climb mountains for it, become a monster and kill for it, and it still might not be enough to save the things that really mattered. The only thing. The only person.
He spent days, months, years, running towards Bella Swan, and when she’s gone, he loses momentum. He falls back on inertia.
Inertia brings him to Anne.
Their first kiss is just a drifting forward. He lets the weight of his own failures carry him towards her, covers her mouth with his so he can’t hear her crying. She says Jacob like she knows every shitty thing that he’s done in life, every single mistake and pettiness and accidental rage and wound he’s inflicted, every single cold silence that he’s allowed to go on ten seconds too long.
There’s a kind of comfort in being with something who asks for nothing. Jacob’s already given everything (the best years of his life, all internal organs, eternal devotion, and a little something that some philosophers might call his soul) to that bitch goddess Love.
Their relationship is one of restful silence and empty hands. They don’t look at each other, but out towards the sea.
Anne doesn’t ask for anything. So he gives her nothing, in return.
end.