Alanis Brisette Irony On Quotes

I.

“No one will ever love you like I do.”

When he spits that out from between his teeth, so full of venom and contempt, what he’s saying is that you are unlovable. You are lucky to find someone who gives you attention, someone still willing to give you attention, but you are throwing it all away. He thinks I’m sorry makes up for barbed words, and harsh criticism, and feeling lower than useless; he thinks you should think that it is better to have this kind of love than none at all; he thinks that convincing you that it’s you and him against the world is something more than just isolating and lonely. So you laugh, because you know what he means but he’s always called you stupid anyway, so you can pretend that you don’t. You tell him, Good.

III.

You don’t know if it’s irony irony, or Alanis Morisette irony, but Dom has never been good at music. It’s a cliché for a reason, but you really are mirror copies of each other and what you lack, he makes up for and vice versa. There’s a sort of stability to him that you’ve never managed to duplicate, and you envy it more than you would care to admit. But at least you have this. Even when you were both young, his appreciation for music never translated into actual skill.

It’s strange for you to listen to yourself and you’re more self-conscious than you’d care to admit, so at a listening party with your closest friends you avoid looking people in the eyes in case they can’t hide the disappointment you think they have. You think about anything, about how humid it is, and how your brother was never any good at music and how the raspy girl over the speakers, that sort of, almost sounds like you asking are you just being cruel to be cruel? could have come from the last six months, or last year, or five years ago.

“Maybe that’s why you couldn't make music for shit,” you say, the real you, the one whose voice is heavy with liquor and self pity. “You haven’t

You know you can’t get ‘better’ by telling half-truths, but the diagnosis this woman with her gentle, TV-shrink voice gave you a year ago doesn’t hold hope for a ‘better’ anyway. Cyclothymia is managed and documented meticulously in the emotions journal you still keep hidden from your brothers (the ones by blood and the ones by choice); it isn’t cured, one day. You can’t even hope for a steady stream of chemicals to nudge you in the right direction of how to feel, how to act, how to cope. We find that drugs tend to worsen the disorder, encourage hypomanic episodes, she said the day she explained it to you. You waited to feel a light bulb go off, to have that epiphany of this is who you were, this is why you were, but you sat there worrying that the same something wrong with you could be wrong with your siblings