Here is a link to Sonia singing this terrific song. It’s badly recorded by a cell phone, but I’m so grateful I have that recording since I can’t find this song anywhere!
She came in on a Greyhound
a sight for sore eyes
gave me a smile
then threw her luggage down
and stood there
like a song without a sound.
They both always had a travelin bone
she roamed from town to town
she don’t ask for nothing and she never stays too long
but it’s a good time every time she rolls around
Use my shower
Sleep on my couch
you can keep my old blue jeans with the bottoms all worn out
rest here a while I hate to see you go
but remember me when you’re out on the road
all the colors you leave behind
we got stoned on a Sunday afternoon
just watching the trains roll by
I had my chance and somehow it fell too soon
so I just threw salt at the sky
She showed me freedom
she made me wild
and all I knew seemed so small that day
we hitchhiked down town
and that’s the last time that I saw her
but I whispered before she flew away…
Use my shower
Sleep on my couch
you can keep my old blue jeans with the bottoms all worn out
rest here a while I hate to see you go
but remember me when you’re out on the road
all the colors you leave behind
…of the places you know I’ll find
….and the colors you leave behind…
She came in on a Greyhound
Because I don’t believe in love anymore, or dating, or even trying to find love. Or God, or words, or hope, or reading, or romance, or putting on makeup to feel pretty, or showering, or wearing cute clothes, or sex, or drinking to numb the pain and prolong the inevitable.
Because I don’t believe in happy endings, or good defeating evil in the end, or that telling the truth matters, or that people actually care about others.
Because I don’t believe in life, or being forced to suffer emotional anguish for 42 years then to be ripped of the only thing from those 42 years that mattered enough to keep you going.
Because I don’t believe in innocence, or music killing the pain, or cooking, or eating.
Because I don’t believe in writing, or talking, or watching movies.
Because I don’t believe in buying your dad’s house to feel love that is no longer there and probably never existed really anyway, or believe in the beauty of nostalgia, or laughter, or even the memories of laughter.
Because I don’t even believe in my memories anymore. They have been raped, pillaged, and destroyed by the same mother fuckers who shit on the first ones I had. Because their lies trump my truths, and because their abuse doesn’t count any more today than it ever did.
Because I don’t believe in reaching out, or the fleeting hope that a stupid astrological forecast might even bring some hope or good news.
Because I don’t believe in mothers, or children, or protecting those who can’t protect themselves.
Because I don’t believe in art soothing a broken soul, or art for beauty, or beauty at all.
Because I don’t believe in anything.
Because I feel more stupid than ever that it took me 45 fucking years to face how stupid believing in anything ever was while living with the life I was given, which has done nothing but repeatedly prove that hoping for better is a fantasy as silly as unicorns and Santa Claus.
Because I don’t believe in rebuilding hope from the rubble again…a-mother-fucking-again.
Because I don’t even have the pictures or letters or memories of once-upon-a-time believing I was loved.
Because I don’t have the precious artwork and baby photos of me as a momma with my children…the artwork I could never bear to throw away…because anything made with even the possibility of loving me was fucking precious, even if it was a scribble of pen on scrap paper…
Because even those were taken from me…taken from me because I did not protect myself from the monsters who took all of this from me before I rebuilt, and rebuilt, and rebuilt again.
Because every love I carried for 9 months in my body to protect, hug, hold hands, feed, bathe, and love for always was taken too.
Because every evidence of that love even maybe being real at some point is gone. Gone for our “own good” along with the home we created with it, taken from us with lies and deceit for our “own good”.
Because my every love and every hope for love and every fucking memory of love I had saved for my whole fucking life was taken from me “for my own good”, by a monster who’s never had a fucking thing taken from him his entire life. A selfish fucking monster who has to have EVERYTHING for his mother fucking self…ALL of it. Even the tiny threads of hope that I had, the tiny momentary precious memories I had amassed, the love I thought I would really have at last from my children, the love I thought God gave me for my own with my children. Because the fucking monsters had to have that too.
She says she loves me, my precious, beloved Lexi. She says, “I love you momma”. And for a minute this week, I started to believe….started to let myself hope again. I can even remember the very first time this very child first said these very words of joy and hope to me!! I remember!! So, I take those words, blow them up, and surround them with the biggest beams of sunshine I can muster from below my pit of despair…pulling them up from that tiny child of innocence in this aging woman’s soul. Pushing aside the despair, the years of abuse and cruelty, past the desperation for death, past the hundreds of hopeless nights of tears, past the fucking wasteland that is me, holy fuck, I grabbed onto these words.
I fluff the words up like pillows I can hold tightly to my body, desperately holding that pillow against my broken soul, waiting to feel a moment of peace or joy maybe after all these years the words and the sentiments behind them were ripped from me. These fucking words, I clung to like a drowning man gasping for just a whimsical random flash of oxygen to fuel his life for just another fraction of a second…
I breathed those four words in so deeply, it sparked my life-long fantasy that these words have value…have meaning…have substance. The very same ridiculous fantasy which will be the death of me. Well, that fantasy isn’t merciful enough to literally cause death; it only makes one so fucking pathetically desperate for death.
Last night I realized all my life I’ve been clinging to the very god damned thing that’s been slowly killing me all my life. Me… my memory flashes back to millions of moments in time, clutching, clinging, scratching, and furiously begging for the mother fucking thing that would ultimately destroy me once and for all.
Oh hope is a false prophet, a mirage of water to a wandering soul lost in the desert. Hope is a mother fucking whore.
I love you momma. I love you momma and my friend is in the car, so I can’t stay long. I love you momma and I don’t want to hear your feelings. I love you momma and I love the people who’ve abused and destroyed you too, just as much. I love you momma and I don’t know who to believe. I love you momma and I’m leaving because I can live without you in my life. I love you momma and I need you to shut up about what’s been done to you by the people I love and want in my life. I love you but I will let you spend another holiday alone without your dad or your children. I love you momma as long as you shut up and smile. I love you momma as long as you don’t speak to me of your struggles, your loneliness, your damage, or your destruction because I haven’t yet decided who’s telling the truth…but I love you momma. I love you momma and Memaw and daddy don’t keep talking when I ask them not to. They don’t need to keep telling me awful made-up fabrications about how you’ve been the worst, most useless person ever. Thus, I don’t want you to keep talking about how they’ve destroyed you. I love you momma and I love them.
Are daddy and Memaw destroyed? Where is this damage to their lives I’ve caused with my worthlessness? Where is it? Where is their reason to be angry at me? their reason for destroying the only thing that I had in my life that was mine..mine to love, mine to be loved, my only light in the darkness of the horrors they intentionally created? Where is their destruction, baby? If I knew it or understood how I destroyed their lives, maybe I could better suck up the damage they’ve done to my whole life…past, present, and future. Where is the suffering I caused them? I need to know it so I can shut up and take the medicine I deserve of the final, ultimate blow they delivered when my daddy died and they ripped me from the hearts of my babies. I need to see it or at least know what/where/how it is, this horrifying pain I dished out to these people.
I love you momma. I feel horrible about how I’ve treated you and how I treated my dad when he stole our house for our “own good”. I won’t shut you out of my life again, but my friend is in the car and your words no, your tone, make me angry.
I love you momma but I’m going to spend this holiday with my sister and my dad and my grandma. I love you momma but spending a holiday with you since your dad died just isn’t something that I want to do. I love you though momma. I won’t shut you out again. Or anyone in my family… Well, I won’t shun you again as long as you SHUT UP about the abuse memaw and daddy have heaped upon you before me or how they’ve destroyed you completely at last using me to finish you off.
I mean it Momma, SHUT UP about it or I WILL shun you completely out of my life again. This time not with lies as my excuse but because you’re insisting on speaking truths I don’t want to hear…Truths, I WILL NOT hear. Or you shall be shunned again. The 4 times a year or so that I actually talk to your or answer your texts now after nearly four years of ignoring you, those WILL stop if you don’t SHUT UP.
I love you momma and I won’t listen to your feelings no matter how carefully you say them. Your tone frustrates me, even when your words don’t. I love you momma but not knowing who to believe frustrates me. So I love you momma but my friend is waiting in the car and your feelings bother me so I’m leaving. I love you momma but your truths bothers me too much and create too much confusion. I won’t have them. I listened to all the lies and ugliness about you from these people for four years and I’m done with listening to ugly things, so YOU don’t get to talk… If you want me to be your daughter, you don’t.
I love you momma but my friend is waiting in the car and I don’t want the truths of your life. I don’t want the devastation of your destruction at the hands of the other people who said they loved you because I love them too.
I love you momma but three holidays alone…three years ignored, abandoned, cruelly destroyed wasn’t enough. I love you momma but this holiday will be the same as the others. I momma but you deserve all the fucking holidays alone until you finally die and make our lives, living with lies, easier. I know we destroyed your life, but for God’s sake, how can you be so selfish as to want to discuss LET THOSE LIES STAND.
I love you momma but my friend is waiting in the car.
Love does not exist for people whose truth bothers other people too much to bother with. I love you momma but you need to deny your truth. I love you momma but I don’t care what the actual truth is. I love you momma but I love the people who destroyed you and that’s where I’m going. Those are the people I choose for my life. But, I will love you across the country while I’m with those people… if you’ll shut up.
If you could read my mind, love
What a tale my thoughts could tell
Just like an old-time movie
‘Bout a ghost from a wishin’ well
In a castle dark or a fortress strong
With chains upon my feet
You know that ghost is me
And I will never be set free
As long as I’m a ghost that you can’t see
If I could read your mind, love
What a tale your thoughts could tell
Just like a paperback novel
The kind the drugstores sell
When you reach the part where the heartaches come
The hero would be me
But heroes often fail
And you won’t read that book again
Because the ending’s just too hard to take
I’d walk away like a movie star
Who gets burned in a three-way script
Enter number two
A movie queen to play the scene
Of bringing all the good things out in me
But for now love, let’s be real
I never thought I could act this way
And I’ve got to say that I just don’t get it
I don’t know where we went wrong
But the feeling’s gone and I just can’t get it back
If you could read my mind, love
What a tale my thoughts could tell
Just like an old-time movie
‘Bout a ghost from a wishin’ well
In a castle dark or a fortress strong
With chains upon my feet
But stories always end
And if you read between the lines
You’ll know that I’m just tryin’ to understand
The feelings that you lack
I never thought I could feel this way
And I’ve got to say that I just don’t get it
I don’t know where we went wrong
But the feeling’s gone and I just can’t get it back
