Wallflower
by Caroline's Spine
From their 1997 debut album Monsoon
I could have died
Maybe I should have died
When I saw you walk inside
And as you shut the door
I put my eye back on the floor
When all I really wanted was to look some more
Does the Wallflower play, or does the Wallflower stay on his wall
You see I live alone
But I've made my happy home
All my furniture is centered around my phone
My imaginary friends and all
Those who would never let me be taken by the fall
And does the Wallflower know when it's time to outgrow his wall?
Tell me, does the wallflower know when it's time he outgrows his wall?
Chorus: Oh, time and time and time and only time has feeling for me
maybe maybe father time will feel sorry for me
I knew there was a time when there was a time when I knew it all
Why don't I ever leave my wall?(repeat)
And now that siren's getting louder
And the people are starting to crowd in on me
All I smell and taste is garlic and gunpowder
Yeah, I shot the bad guy dead
But he got me in the head
Oh, and the girl of my dreams she's mentioning to me how much I've bled
Where do the Wallflowers go when their flowers get pulled from this wall?
Oh and though she says I'm brave and bold, she knows a flower cannot hold up a wall.
But I can't hold up this wall any longer
All I have is time and time, please some more time
And I think I'm over
And I think I'm over
And I think I'm over...
And now, their
significance to me:
That song really appealed to me about a year and a half ago (Spring 1999 at the time of this writing). It was during the Columbine fallout. Our little town went on their own witchhunt, like many others in America during that time. I wouldn't say we're a very diverse community, but we still needed a scapegoat. Then, I pop up. In Eigth Grade at the time, I was facing the typical middle school and high school social opression. I had not yet learned coping skills nor the value of individualism. Self-confidence (or even sense of self at all for that matter) was zero. It was becoming evident that I had failed in my attempts to be a jock/in-groupie. Recently, it dawned on me that I had NO IDENTITY at that point given the realization I mentioned above. Suicide was a daily thought. I literally became the Wallflower in every percievable way. I would write essays and awful poems, fold them up, write "Pick this up", and drop them in the halls of the middle school because of some irrational fear of having my identity known. I at one time counted 26 days straight where I never spoke a word inside school. I stood out as just about the only perceivable result of the witchhunt taking place correspondingly. So, of course, I was placed under suspicion and had just about every civil liberty violated in the name of paranoia. I guess that was just the breaking point. Things turned around from there, God bless my peers. For the first time in my recollection, people of less than a fifteen year age difference from me actually began to give a shit about me. Literally, they picked this flower off of the wall. They let me forget my past as a wannabe jock cum harbinger of doom and begin changing from the lifeless desk-filler into what I am semi-proud to be today. I still consider myself an outsider, as well as my peers (I can find no fault in them for thinking so). People have now acknowledged at long last that I have been a dedicated pacifist all along. I'm on track to being Valedictorian. If not for the kindness in these people in such a rigid and uncaring place as a typical middle school, for all I know Id've shot the bad guys dead as said in those wonderful lyrics and died a rotting Wallflower on a rotting wall.