Filthy Casual for Life

Ever hear a song that haunts your dreams? That song for me is BTS’s The Truth Untold. It’s a beautiful ballad sung by BTS’s vocal line.

The summer before my freshman year in high school, I met a boy. He was going to be a freshman in college. Our relationship was…complicated. Beautiful, but complicated. Because he was so much older than me, he didn’t want to tie me down. So, we stayed friends in this state of romantic limbo. I dated other boys, but he never dated any other women. Then, one day, it got too much for him and he confessed he was in love with me and he didn’t want me to see this jealous side of him. He admitted that he tried to watch me from afar and allow me to grow, but his heart was ugly and wanted more. I still remember his words after all of these years. “I don’t want to wear this mask anymore. Despite knowing better, I still want you.”

We had a glorious year together.

On my 17th birthday, on his way to see me, he was hit by a drunk driver. I laid in his hospital bed as they pulled him off life support. A part of me died that day.

When I first heard this song, I was drawn the their beautiful voices. Then I read the lyrics and cried. It was Aleksei’s confession in a song. Every little detail of that conversation wraps itself in the lyrics. His vulnerability. His heartache. His loneliness. His determination to let me grow up and wear that mask he hated while feeling like a monster. In the end, I was the one left alone in the broken sandcastle.

On nights like tonight, I think of Aleksei and listen to this song. It is a beautiful song, and I hope you take the time to listen to it at least once in your life.

THE LYRICS

Full of loneliness
This garden bloomed
Covered in thorns
I bind myself in this sandcastle

What is your name?
Do you have somewhere to go?
Oh could you tell me?
I saw you hiding in this garden.

And I know
All of your warmth is real
The blue flower your hand was picking
I want to hold it but

It’s my fate
Don’t smile to me
Light on me
Because I can’t get closer to you
There’s no name I can call you by

You know that I can’t
Show you me, give you me
I can’t show you a ruined part of myself
Once again I put a mask on and go to see you
But I still want you

Bloomed in a garden of loneliness
A flower that resembles you
I wanted to give it to you
After I take off this foolish mask

But I know
I can’t do that forever
I have to hide
Because I’m a monster

I am afraid, I am shattered
I’m so afraid
That you will leave me again in the end
Once again I put on a mask and go see you

The only thing I can do
In the garden, in this world
Is to let a pretty flower that looks like you bloom
And to breathe as the me that you know
But I still want you, ooh-ooh
I still want you, ooh

If only at that time
Just a little, only a little more
If I had dared to stand before you
Would everything be different now?

I’m crying
In this collapsed, broken
Sandcastle left all alone
While looking at this shattered mask

And I still want you
But I still want you
But I still want you
And I still want you