Rakontur.
Strong depiction of the topic through pure reminiscence. The narrative was mostly a casual walk through an old friendship, interspersed with more telling descriptions of their character. I feel like you never gave this person substance. You quickly transitioned into the ending and alluded to more serious trespasses against the idea of truly growing up, but kept us at a distance from understanding why or how this person ended up on this path or how it affected you. I feel like a more solid direction with one of those ideas in mind might've given your piece finality, but I feel like I just read a hurried nevermind by someone who realized they might not want to lay out all the details.
Dancake.
I really liked the repeated tie-ins to the AA coins, it centered your writing in the present day and made it very clear that this complacency is from wanting to return to happier times and preserve them. Perhaps on the surface, the conviction appears to be that drunkenness was the cause of the breakup in the relationship being described. And that by becoming sober the narrator believes he can recapture the desires of his ex, if/ when they cross paths again.
Kind of a common theme amongst breakups: make yourself better because the type of hurt from being left, if the relationship is serious, is tied to who you are at some level. Not just one trait that's discovered when you open up, but to the reflection of yourself as a whole over many moments, over the entire relationship. Something's off.
Memories of the lover are intertwined with alcohol. Whiskey sours/ sipping each others drinks/ nothing fights after some light drinking (described among things listed as very distant from sobriety).
The feeling of want for this person and this relationship inspires an urge to let go of progress that is practically hotwired into seratonin pathways like a familiar alcohol buzz. A sensation you try so hard to forget, but has a footing in your memory via every drunken memory you have.
The speaker's possessiveness of this memory echoes the opening quote and the topic, and is reflected in the coins again.
This verse expresses the need for a new addiction, a new anything to become a fixation to tether yourself to. The motifs of dryness and the aural reminder from tumbling coins are paralleled by the anticipation of that thirst being quenched, and here we find our narrator at the tipping point- that failed attempt to flirt with the other attendee.
Not mentioning a desire to have a drink implicitly gives the connection between past love/ drinking more resonance, and I think was a deft move by Cake to reinforce the topic's bearing on the piece.
Quote:
not even old enough to hold the whiskey sours you used to make for me.
i hit on her during a break. i thought our eyes had exchanged
she left abruptly,
either i've lost it, she's gay, or the rules since the nineties have changed.
i don't know. nor do i care, really. it was only a test run, that.
a test. to shake off the rust, for when my best comes back, for romantic rejoinder.
it gave me a smile. the thought gave me a buzz. i danced in the foyer.
|
^^^the heart of your verse, especially the zig-zag at 'she left abruptly'
Vote: I like Cake's verse much better, I think it was a little bit emotionally sparse but framed the topic perfectly.