catching fireflies

This is the Future - Owl City

This song saved my life one day in April of 2008. Too sick to live with myself, I sat on my swings shuddering with each breath I took. I couldn’t comprehend the failure that had overtaken me within the previous months. How I became so ill, how I succumbed to the nausea and addiction to my shrinking body; it all disgustingly fed into my desires to become nothing— for good. My frail, pale arms were raw, burning, and pulsing with the cuts that earlier shredded the skin I saw as meaningless, ugly. As I slowed the swinging motions, ready to up and sink myself into another painful attempt at relief I heard this song begin. I had recently purchased that album, very much attracted to Dear Vienna and I’ll Meet You There but this song I wasn’t all too familiar with. I let it play. As he sang to me, my eyes glazed and I stared straight ahead until they stung with tears.

Then I knew. I knew that no matter where the invading disease took me, if I lived, I was meant to. So even now, even when I rip at my skin with the hysteric movements of my fingernails, even when I lay in bed physically hollow from loneliness and violation, even when I feel myself slip away— This is the future and I am alive.