finding shelter in sorrow

“Sorrow’s been my shelter, will you be my home?”⁣
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This lyric with the way his voice gets shaky, full of pain and yearning, makes my chest tight, like all of a sudden I can’t breathe. And when I finally do muster up a deep breath that expands within me, I arrive at this lyric, “I’m still learning, learning, learning how to be loved by you.” That’s when the watery exhale escapes, flooded by layers of tears. ⁣
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Perry wrote this song about a decade ago when things were new with us. He’d recorded it in England and emailed it to me. I sat in my crumbling apartment in the marina on the west side of L.A., the ocean outside my window and thought of the ocean between us. The rawness in his voice just about killed me with all of its beauty, all of its truth. Even now as I write this, my breath has left me again and I’m left grasping. ⁣
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I’ve found shelter in sorrow throughout all of my existence. It started as a matter of survival that turned into a comfort, like a child who makes friends with the monster in her closet. There’s something so achingly beautiful and calming in the sorrow that always has its way of finding me. I find a sort of equanimity in how fucked up things can get. Perry has found this, too. He willingly walks into the darkness with me, time and time again. And it’s here, where it’s so dark that we can’t see our hands in front of our faces, that we’ve found home. In each other’s most broken pieces, the parts we thought we needed to keep hidden, the fragments everyone else discarded—this is where we found home. ⁣
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The song is called The Fall and it’s on his new EP titled Sway. It’s barely over two minutes but it packs a lifetime worth of feeling. I fucking love you, Perry Rhodes. Thank you for being my home.