All We Ever Wanted
...was everything || A Birdsong
I have been consumed. I am consumed. I get consumed. By various things and then I disappear into them. Maybe one day it will be the right thing. Maybe it already is. My people wonder. So then I do too. I am told I will burn out, but passion is how I accomplish things and if I don’t care, then I don’t do.
About eight weeks ago I found out the specialty shop I worked for was going to close. I loved working there. The owner was ‘done’. “Moving on”. In one fell swoop and another’s mind changed, I needed a job. I cried about it.
This was a job I was good at. I enjoyed it. I was able to take all of the knowledge I had accumulated over the past twenty plus years and distill it out to clear answers— to help. I wasn’t a salesman, but— I was. I was helpful. The kind of person you want to meet when you walk into an overwhelming situation.
I called my husband to tell him I was out of work. I was with his mother and asked him to come get me. I lamented my loss to him and he didn’t join me in my misery.
“You could run that shop,” he said.
I wondered if he was right. I don’t always believe what people tell me. I’m better at believing what I imagine people think. Believing what others say takes time. I have to let go of my assumptions first.
But… he helped me. As always. Yet again, our two parts make one whole.
We bought the shop. That was the meeting I mentioned in the Thrust Birdsong. The one that I said might toss my life in a new direction. It went well— we own it.
I am up to the brim with to-do’s— and joy and worry. All the ease of being the shop girl is now all the concern of being a business owner. I could get into the fretting of economics and tariffs and being as much of a capitalist as I can stand to admit to… but that isn’t the story here.
It is the joy of a new chapter and it is the loss of not having written any.
As the days fill up and pass I find myself thinking that I don’t care if I finish my book. Then come those nights where I lay wide awake and worry. I am straying from a purpose that makes me— me. It gnaws at me because I wonder why. More often than not I feel that my book will be written for me and me alone— and I wonder if that is reason enough to get it out, or a just cause to let it go. Then I think that I can’t be a writer if I don’t write. Equally I feel I can’t make this story I have dragged out for years be my whole life— and then I think— maybe I can.
I have become afraid of my passion for this story. I fear upsetting people. I fear my words— myself. I want to write it, I want it published and I want no one I know to read it.
Basically I want it all.
All I ever wanted is everything.
I want this shop and I am full to the brim with learning and verve. I am doing everything I can for it. And I can see how much I must now fight for the store as well as for my story— I fight time itself.
It is late where I am.
My household is in bed. I am alone with this glowing machine— not writing my book but writing here. This place has become safer. A place where I can skirt around my feelings. Delay.
Delay…
My work never ends now. I drag it about with me. I disappear into it and now I also have inventory to deal with, a resell license to renew a month after applying for it— I am learning that renewals that happen in January actually happen in October. And I have not only a book to write, but here too. I want to write here too. I try to squash every week into a day.
I want it all…
This is where I live my days.
“All we ever wanted was everything, all we ever got was…”
One book since 100 years ago…
I am still reading that damn book1. I have found parts I like more, parts where I see a character more than I have. I want this book to be more than it is— and less. Really, I need it to be over. I don’t love the pages long paragraphs. The writing has a lot of little technicalities that I don’t use, that I don’t want to use. Worse, this book makes me feel like I’m not intelligent. I read the latest Nobel prize in literature that essentially writes in one meandering sentence.2 And here I am, a girl who loves a short paragraph. Maybe I’m too simplistic— too basic for true appreciation. Maybe I just think I love literature and instead I like stories. I wonder if I might read books from the man that just won the prize. Test my theory, my mettle. Hate something new?
I like distinction in characters, here I trudge through namesakes. I manage by referring to the family tree on page three more than I care to. Who?? Which?? In the deep of page 270— a whole lot of who? I do love the timeline. A beginning of a world to the end of a world, but I think the lesson of what I can learn about myself and others from this has been absorbed, and still onward I go.
My favorite characters die. And such is life. My husband lost a childhood friend last month. A friend we both had, and now we ask why do favorite characters die in our real life? I feel the book mocked us. Other characters vanish into their homes and make random appearances right before they die. Now I fear this as an omen. This book is long paragraphs and a war of death. I wonder if I had read it at another time in my life would I feel differently? Am I not who in need to be to see it as a it’s meant? Would I ever?
I know if I do write my book it will not emulate this one and outside of that I wonder why I continue to torture myself with a story I am not enjoying despite telling all of you to do exactly that. I feel I may be a liar if I quit. If I say to you— read a book you hate then I must listen to myself. Prove myself trustworthy.
It is a lesson on staying with it. A lesson in learning what I don’t want— despite wanting everything… I guess, everything but this.
I put new books on my nightstand. Maybe I can talk about them soon…
Song on Repeat
BAUHAUS, All We Ever Wanted, 1982
All we ever wanted
Was everything
All we ever got
Was cold
Get up, eat jelly
Sandwich bars and barbed wire
And squash every week into a day
Oh oh oh oh
Oh oh oh oh
The sound of the drum
Is calling
The sound of the drum
Has called
Flash of youth shoot out of darkness
Factory town
Oh oh oh oh
Oh oh oh oh
Oh to be the cream
Oh to be the cream
Oh to be the cream
Oh to be the cream
Oh to be the cream
Oh to be the cream
I misheard the lyrics on this one. In fact, it wasn’t until I looked them up for this piece I learned I was mistaken. I had the first verse wrong. I thought it was “all we ever wanted was everything, all we ever got was gold”. Meaning you get a great life, but you want more… This shift, getting ‘cold’… it changes things, doesn’t it?
I have a great life but I seem to not see the glitter of the gold sometimes. I do what humans do and take things for granted. I try to be grateful and aware… but I want more. And wanting more often leads me to feeling cold. Damn everything, I think.
I love gothic eighties music— always have. I wonder if people love the music from their childhood just because it was a simpler time. A time when you could think of having everything with no repercussions. As an adult you learn you have choices, decisions and if you want something it usually means you are missing out on something else… But oh, to be the cream.
Andrea Thomas is a queer American writer. Her essays, poems and creative nonfiction speak of being a late bloomer, a new traveler and testing everyone’s cultural norms. You can find some of her writing at Bird on a Mast on Substack where she sorts out her mid-life crisis origin story and on Instagram where she posts her proof of life.
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. 1967
Please tell me if you love this book… I want to hear from you.
László Krasznahorkai
Wow! What a pivot.. I feel like I’ve missed a whole chapter of your story..so exciting!
Sounds exciting - wishing you every success! (Bauhaus are great btw - love Bela Lugosi's Dead). ✨️