SONG 2: Because I Love Her

I’m struggling slightly to write about this song. I’m not entirely sure how to talk about it. Probably because my head is still left on my pillow today and there’s a fog of sleeplessness over everything. I wrote this song in spring after I’d become stable again after the breakdown in winter. It took a lot of therapy and delving into mindfulness and stoicism, determinsim, buddhism, and listening to far too much Alan Watts. I was like a white blood cell fighting a disease, trying my hardest to combat depression with everything I could think of, Pretty desperately throwing books and podcasts at it. It ultimately did work with the combination of therapy and I managed to change the way I think, but there’s only so much that can do to speed up the natural process of grieving and repair that I was going through and am still going through.

I was still intensely angry at the situation and at myself. That’s why this song is one of the most bitter and venomous songs I’ve ever written. At the same time as doing so much work to inform myself on how I could change to stop this hurting so badly I still had those periods of intense self-hatred and burning anxiety spreading through me that could only be dampened by time and this frustrated me so much. I was still questioning why I stayed with her, why I put myself through everything instead of accepting it happened and moving on.

So this song is that frustration and some of coming to terms with the reason why. “Because I Love Her” the simplest reason. It’s meant in a slightly tongue-in-cheek way here but it’s also entirely valid. At the time I did love her, and I’m sure there was a valid reason for that, but, in hindsight, it is a perverse and self-destructive form of love and the thought of it disgusts me.

Because I Love Her Lyrics:

Not around today

Sitting on the floor

I Still eat her food

And play with the fuse

Because I love her

With steel capped boots

Treading on their toes

I Bite My tongue

And taste the blood

Because I love her

Paying with her mouth

To sit on clouds

And watch her sleep around

And vomit on the sheets

I Just don’t eat

I Just don’t eat

I Just don’t eat

I Just don’t eat

Because I love her

There’s some specifics in the lyrics here. There were rumours she was cheating on me that most likely are true, I haven’t got any concrete proof but after finding out concretely that she was lying to me about her drug use I can’t really tell. I lumped both of these issues into verse 3 ‘She’s paying out her mouth, to sit on clouds, watch her sleep around, and vomit on the sheets’ in a pretty extreme implication that just isn’t true (Giving blowjobs for drugs to clarify, A very uncouth and extreme image I conjured). I had a lot of anger and this is entirely aimed to harm and wound her.

There’s some more specific things like the first verse starting with me dealing with her terrible cooking. Thinking specifically of a time where she cooked terrible noodles and we ate it sitting on her tobacco-covered bedroom floor. And then the second verse, me putting up with the way she treated people poorly and saying nothing about it to continue the cycle of self-harm disguised as selfless love.

This may have become a little incoherent, writing about this is difficult and I begin to make less sense when something touches a nerve. My brain scrambles. This song is a clusterfuck of anger. My pinkie finger hurts from writing.