And to think i almost gave up on the bricks by the river

I wish it was fall. I can be alone in the fall. The colors are vibrant and the wind is cold but I can still crack my car windows.

The grass all grows pale and snaps like brittle bones beneath the shoes of school children that race home through an abandoned graveyard in west taunton where fourteen years ago they buried my grandmother. I remember riding by on the freezing green plastic of the school bus seats, staring out the window and trying to find her gravestone in the snapshot I had from when the seat ahead of me gave way, and before the seat behind me swallowed it all back up. I never could, but I know it was near the black obelisk headstone with he glowing green text slab. I never really found it, but I looked, and I knew that was good enough, and I knew that some where, my grandmother appreciated it too.

I'm 24 now and I still lookout the side view window when I drive by. The heat of the vents blow my shoes, and the crack in my window leaves me pale cheeks a pink hue. neil hits those lonely pained notes somewhere out over the noise and I hope somewhere out there they can all hear him.

Theres something I can never tell anyone about Taunton, about all the sun sets over 5 p.m. school houses. About Why grampies in the center of town at midnight, about November Christmas parades, the windswept hills of the Poor Farm and how it looks at twilight when you run through it. About the smell of September 5th and how it smells like new clothes, and old friends, and books and cafeteria lunches, and it smells like the warmth you feel when you're staring out the window because you hate math and you look at the smoke emerging from chimneys and you think how lucky you are to be inside and warm. It smells just like that.

Theres something locked up in my mind about the fall. The sky is always purple in the taunton autumn, and the moons always halved, and its always leaning like a classed up scumbag against a local tavern bartop and it leans like his crooked grin. The trees are always sparse and their always the right amount of each color and theres a feeling of blue jeans and button up shirts being tucked into your jeans too far by your grandmother. you never knew you looked like a young republican, you just ran around outside and jumped in the leaves and hopped the colonial wooden fences and stone walls and you ran inside and the oven was always roaring. I can't ever seem to nail the gratitude of a warm house when you've just played too many games of tag, when your lungs are alive with the frozen burn of fall air.

I can't let go of leaning against the back of my grandmothers house and looking out over the forest and watching the hawk soar over the field back into the tree line, and keeping warm in the dryer vent that let out and up over the old farm house. I felt so tall behind that house.

I can't explain the Taunton front lawns, or why the roadways seem remote and more adventurous, even having lived them a thousand times over. its a love affair I can't explain, and one I forever draw from. Its a tumult of a relationship. we'll always love each over, more deep than I could explain, but we'll never work and we'll never work. It just won't happen. Taunton is lonely and its broken and its trees whistle that all too well. its best loved from afar, in person and memory.

I don't know where any of that just came from. Im listening to Seven Mary Three and it tripped my memory. I have no idea why, but its shit like this that makes me think "Brennan, you'll never figure yourself out."

"My my skin can't take much more of this" she says
You're scaling over me
Every time I wash it off, I find you underneath
And if mercy was a cattle call
She didn't hear...
She didn't want to play the role of the fool again
Won't be fooled again...