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she got whatever it is
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I can usually gauge where I'm at by how seriously I take country songs. If I catch myself turning them up, holding my breath, waiting for the next line like it's some kind of prophetic word, then it's not looking good. If they make me cry, I'm lost. I really am.
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If I've forgotten who I am and what I'm worth, if the ticking pulse over my left eyelid won't go away, if I've remembered the things I've done, the things I'm caught in, I am helpless in the wake of these songs. Not the ones about no-account cheatin' men or high school girls from Georgia with great legs, but the ones about farmer's daughters and tall drinks of water. They become the only link I have to the kind of world I want to be in. When the commercials for deer feeders and Auto-Zone come back on, I want to shout, Wait! Come back! Tell me what to do!
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My problems aren't big. I'm just alive, like everyone else. I'm sad and scared and a little lonely. And right now I don't need windshield wipers or deer corn. I need someone to tell me I'm not the only one, there is a party I'm invited to, there is a man out there who will love me, there is a God who remembers who I am.
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I need an old man to sing about how he loves his wife, how he wouldn't trade their years of kicking back on screened porches or staying up late in bed whispering and snorting with laughter for anything, anything. How he loves her, how there is no one else that matches her for him, how he knows how she got the scars on her back and the slow rhythmic drawl in her voice.
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I need to know that it's not about who has the best pair of legs. I need to know this so badly that when I think it may not be true, I feel very young all the sudden, very young and strange, like my little-girl heart has hairline cracks running all along it like streaks of heat lightning that burn and then calcify into something harder than bone.
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I need to hear songs about people who love each other, people who won't leave, people who didn't give up searching for the things they desired until they found them. I'm tired of songs about people who settled for the first person they convinced to sleep with them or the first place they ran out of gas or the first job they got to pay the bills, staying until they bitterly resented it, needed it, were too scared to leave it.
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She got whatever it is, it blows me away, he sings, and it almost breaks my heart right back along those lines. It's dumb, maybe, but for the things the world does to my heart and soul, it's the only cure I know.
