This is My Jam: The Cab- “Take My Hand”
by Meridith Carroll on March 11, 2015
I wake up at 8:00 AM and snooze my alarm twice before lolling over the side of my bed to grab my laptop so I can perch it on my chest as I check my email/facebook/twitter/horoscope. I begin to calculate just how many minutes I can afford to spend in bed before I ransack my drawers for clean underwear and whatever clothes, but I abort mission before I finish. Instead, I decide that I am going to skip my morning class to work on my homework/mental health/thesis and, obviously, this turns into staying in bed to watch multiple episodes of The OC/Breaking Bad/the Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.
I check the weather forecast, even though I sleep with my shades open so I am well aware that it is sunny. When I look outside, I can see boys walking around in basketball shorts, so I guess that it’s warm, though I’ve known many a boy to walk around in basketball shorts in negative degree weather so, once again, boys can’t be trusted. But the forecast assures me: finally, the sun outside means that there’s actually some warmth to the air. Finally, I can swap my black wool skirt for black shorts and feel powerful and self-conscious as my thighs rub together in the exact same way they always rub together. Only now it feels magical and new because they are exposed to the daylight, exposed to my own eyes.
Calm your nerves now/ Don’t worry, just breathe
The exact date does not matter. The details are fluid enough. A year ago I was in England eating goat cheese and skipping Shakespeare class. Many years ago, I was ditching biology to go home and write sad poems on my blog. Eons ago, I was hiding from Catholic school and the nervous sweats I got the second I walked in the door. I have lived mornings like this for years: sloppy, lazy school days when, just as the sun could make me feel ambitious, I indulge in my worst bits of laziness.
Most can’t deny that the thaw from winter to spring makes you feel so hopeful, so invincible. In the sun, you can forget that mercury ever went into retrograde. You can forget that in a wintry-grey hellscape, the skyline is just a blur where the dirty snow meets the dirty sky. You can forget wanting to cry because you know how horrific it can be to be a woman though you can’t know exactly how horrific it could be to be another woman just trying to make it through January alive. You can forget the days when you considered shaving your head just to rebel against the shrieking winter that clawed its way to your bed and dug its nails in real deep as you slept under seven quilts, still shivering. You can forget about the nights when boys talked to you, engaged you, indulged you and all you could do was sit and stare at the wall and try to move as little as possible. You can forget that everything felt so tight and weird that you changed your name and cut off all of your hair in hopes that it’d make the weather follow suit and change faster.
Or maybe these are just things I need to forget. Maybe you like to remember things like this. Maybe you don’t even have things like this to forget in the first place.
All of them said they want a change/ I’m hoping that you remain the same
Here’s what I do like to remember: one morning, in the spring of 2007, I woke up and the sky was blue blue blue and the sun was flooding onto my pink velvet comforter and everything was bright and soft and I felt good. Then I heard a demo of this song for the first time and it made me feel even better. And I didn’t stop listening to it for months. The next year, the same thing happened and it still felt good. That day when the winter breaks and spring finally comes through for more than 12 hours—it’s an annual miracle.
And no matter how bad the winter, that day always comes and, when it does, I listen to this song on repeat for hours. I’m listening to it right now, sitting next to a bunch of windows and laughing for no reason. No reason! And it feels AMAZING! I’ve listened to it at least 20 times since I started writing this and each time it starts I get excited and I feel like I’m in a very normative but still very good romantic comedy. I can only hope that everyone has a song that sends off all of their pleasure synapses for them the way this one does for me. I’m not going to try to convince you that this is a good song because it’s not. But for my little dog brain, it’s pavlolv’s bell saying “HEY GIRL, COME BACK TO US. IT’S SPRING.” And here I am. I’m Back. Simple as that.
I <3 this!