Tour Blog: Candy Hearts (Part Three)
"I’m sitting right now in my bed in New Jersey and I’ve seriously underestimated how comfortable it is. Every time I go away, I never really remember how good it feels to sleep in a place that’s all my own. It’s going to take a small army (or maybe just a couple of good friends with some really, really good plans) to pull me out of it.
Last night was our last day of tour. We spent the entire day in Philadelphia doing touristy things, since I’ve never really hung around there. It was the first time all of tour that my day wasn’t scheduled down to the very last 5 minutes. We went to this bar right next to a tattoo shop where the bartender was really nice. He gave me a pint glass and gave us free wings.
Before Friday, we had taken the 13 hour drive from Atlanta to Delaware, where I slept in my younger brother’s empty apartment. He hasn’t moved in yet and it felt like I was squatting in this abandoned house. It was this eerie feeling of having a completely empty house to myself – unfurnished and unclean with posters I remember from his bedroom at home rolled up underneath his bed frame. The rest of the band stayed somewhere else so they could party and hang out with friends, but I had to work in the morning and kind of just wanted to be alone.
There’s something about being in a car for 13 hours that makes you just want to be by yourself. It’s the small things that start to annoy you after you’ve been trapped in a car with your best friends surviving only on Monster energy drinks and gas station snack food, like how Kris laughs at things when they’re not funny or how Christian knows infinitely more bands than I know and makes me listen to them without telling me what it is first. Even after all the jokes I don’t think are funny and write off and whine about, sometimes something is just really, really deliriously hilarious and you have to laugh. It’s been a while since I laughed so hard that I cried, and in that car, I sat in the passenger’s seat grasping onto the dashboard for air and screaming with laughter.
Now I’m finally home and settling into my messy room. I was talking about this with someone last night. It seems like I’m always waiting for life to “go back to normal” -- to get off the road, even if we’re driving for 15 minutes, for the show to be over, to stop seeing the people I’ve recently been seeing a lot, to surrender the new places I’ve discovered at home for the places I’ve frequented since college and for life to slow down. For me, it always hits at once. I wake up and I discover that life doesn’t slow down – this is my life: the places, the shows, the friends, the people. It’s like the moment you realize you’re more than just friends with someone, that you’re in a relationship, but in this case, the relationship is with my own life. Maybe it’s just me not taking care of myself or actively participating and planning the things that I’m doing. I’ve been trying to ride things out as long as possible without questioning it – something I’m not particularly skilled at, but it seems to be working out okay.
There is one more thing I can’t believe: the mosquitoes in Atlanta are absolutely relentless. I’ve never had so many bug bites in my life. I fell asleep for 2 hours in Mixtapes’ van with the door open in the parking lot of WonderRoot and woke up covered in bug bites. Is this normal for Georgia? Someone confirm."
