Ever have that one song?
The one song that takes you back to a very specific time in your life? I have a few, but one came on my iTunes tonight and I probably listened to it about five times in a row. Remembering everything memory that it brought back – email chains, the sound of a far away voice that I haven’t heard since I was about 21 maybe 22 – and the words that ultimately ended a summer, youthful, infatuation – one that went no where because it had nowhere to go. But the summer itself despite the pain it ended with, had so many smiles and goodness in it, that I couldn’t help but not smile when I heard it, despite the negativity once associated with the song.
And I don’t know where you went when you left me but
Says here in the water you must be gone by now
I can tell somehow
One hand on the trigger of a telephone
Wondering when the call comes
Where you say it’s alright
You got your heart right
I’m listening to that one song right now. It brings me back to a summer. A summer filled with love and growth and friends and sunshine and laughing and tears and more growth and more learning about myself and all that fun stuff that you do in college.
You know that summer love, the one that isn’t really love at all but teaches you so much about yourself in the mean time but never really amounts to anything but some boy playing his guitar over the phone to you while you wrote 15 page policy papers, making promises that would never be kept, wishing for something that wasn’t there. Phone calls walking to and fro classes, cities away from each other, and the heartbreak, oh my gawd the heartbreak when you finally have that one realization that it’s just…not meant to be and never would be. Years later, you’d be in the same place at the same time, having both long moved on, not even wondering what could have been but reminiscing longingly for those days of youthful infatuation.
Two wrongs make it all alright tonight
All you need is love is a lie cause
We had love but we still said goodbye
Now we’re tired, battered fighters
And it stings when it’s nobody’s fault
Cause there’s nothing to blame at the drop of your name
It’s only the air you took and the breath you left
Ahhh, youth. Remember that summer friends? The summer of kissing boys, and drinking rum that I still don’t know how we got because we were only 20 and barely old enough to know what love was. You know, the type of love where you give up your life for someone else, and someone else gives up theirs for you. The type of love that makes your toes curl in the morning when you wake up next to someone and realize that someone loves you for you. Not for who you were, or who you might be but for the you that’s laying there – bad morning breath and messy hair galore. Yeah, those boys, at 20, were not that kind of love. They were barely the type of love – nay, infatuation or lust – that would IM you in the AM. They were the ones you hoped would turn into that big love. But they didn’t. And so, I spent that summer tanning, taking the T to Revere Beach, watching way too much trashy television with my roommate and bestie (remember Sorority Life?) and breaking up with boys who made me feel bad about myself and being infatuated with ones who weren’t even around. Who I didn’t even know (my former forray into online dating was via livejournal dudes mostly. They’ve got their own set of issues which is a whole NOTHER blog post my friends).
But you know what, everything happens for a reason. And I keep telling myself, and telling myself that in hopes that I’ll feel better about this past year in all it’s ups and downs. You know, the whole leaving DC thing. I have to keep telling myself that we’re happier here. And we are. No really. We are. But a part of me wonders what if I had just worked harder, or found a better job. Or known what the hell I really wanted to do with my life (I still, really, have no idea, or I do but just lack how to get there). Maybe things would be easier. Maybe just maybe…
And I know it was me who called it over but
I still wish you’d fought me ’til your dying day
Don’t let me get away
Cause I can’t wait to figure out what’s wrong with me
So I can say this is the way that I used to be
There’s no substitute for time
Or for the sadness
Split screen sadness
We share the sadness
John Mayer, you have crooned through my speakers and spoken to me on many a summer night. And tonight, you were the perfect inspiration to remind me to live in the moment. Be present here and now. Just like yoga teaches us. Strength from within, not from the past, because the past is what brought us here to now. And if I wasn’t here, if I hadn’t gotten here, I wouldn’t have found my love of yoga, my inspiring coworkers, and I wouldn’t have my loving husband to experience all of it with. So even though some of those summer nights back in 2003 (and even the following years)hurt. A lot. And I cried, a lot, they made me stronger, and they brought me here. To the present.
