Audience Of One

“Audience of One”
By: Rise Against

TJ, this song was always a great song to both of us. Even though I probably didn’t feel the same things you felt when listening to it, it still evokes emotions now. It finally makes sense to me. (Everyone feels something different and finds different meaning in a song. This is what it means to me.)

“I can still remember the words and what they meant,
As we etched them with our fingers in years of wet cement”

-I still remember the day that you first told me that you loved me. I could tell that you meant it, and even better, you waited to tell me. The last time we’d hangout before you left me for a month to go to your dad’s house, 4 hours away. I traced invisible lines on the dried cement that is your back porch, out of pure joy, not really sure what else to do at that point.

“Days blur into each other though everything seemed clear,
We cruised along at half speed but then we shifted gears”

-Thinking back on it all, now, I don’t remember every instance, but I remember that I thought I knew it all. Only now does it all make sense to me. We flew through life carelessly, acknowledging only each other, ignoring everything that wasn’t the other. Then one day we woke up to really see things for what they were. We saw the truth.

“We ran like vampires from a thousand burning suns,
But even then we should have stayed”

-We ran from everything that we didn’t want to hear, just to be with each other, but we should’ve listened.

“But we ran away, now all my friends are gone,
Maybe we've outgrown all the things that we once loved”

-I ran all my friends off, because I only could see you. Now when I need them most, they’re gone. When we started out we had our goal in sight, now we’re not sure what we want, and we’re not even sure if we should be together anymore...

“Run away, what are we running from?
A show of hands from those in this audience of one
Where have they gone?”

-We ran away from everything so long, trying to hard to be different. We don’t even know why we ran, or what we were running from anymore. When we turned back to everyone, the only one remaining was the other. We question where everyone went, when it was us that drove them away.

“Identities assume us as nine and five add up,
Synchronizing watches to the seconds that we lost”

-We became people that we thought we should be, who were not really who we are. We were so consumed with each other, that we didn’t realize all the time we lost to each other.

“And I looked up and saw you; I know that you saw me,
We froze but for a moment in empathy”

-Things started to fall apart and I felt like you were just another person. I was on my own again. We felt something for the other again, only to find out that it wasn’t the love we once had, it’s just empathy for the pain we’d caused each other.

“I brought down the sky for you but all you did was shrug,
You gave my emptiness a name”

-I did everything in my power to regain what we once had, but it didn’t faze you. The empty feeling I felt was all you.

“We're all okay until the day we're not,
The surface shines while the inside rots”

-We were happy until that day we broke and it all fell apart. We pretended to be okay, while we were slowly dying inside.

“We raced the sunset and we almost won,
We slammed the brakes but the wheels went on,
We ran away”

-We tried to beat the inevitable, and we could’ve but it would’ve been a lie. We tried to stop what was happening to us, but some things can’t be stopped. We ran all this time and now we are left to figure it out, alone.