By Beauty Damned

A Memory

Music music music. Is there any other thing in the universe that can make a person feel the way music does? Those particular songs that bring on a flood of nostalgia and emotions...
Two songs have played in a row on my launchcast station which immediately unearth feelings that have been long forgotten or that I just don't bother to think of anymore. One was "Fascination" by David Bowie and the other is "I'd Rather Be With You" by Bootsy Collins.

Both songs remind me of being 16 years old, walking towards Garo's from high school to meet my friends. Everything around me seemed to slow down to a dream-like pace as I passed by that one house on the end of the block on the corner of East Main St. and 4th in my hometown. That house where the boys lived. Those boys that I didn't know yet, but that would become a huge part of my life in the approaching months and years. One tall, lanky, shirtless boy stood outside smoking a handrolled cigarette. His hair was nearly black, cut short and messy and his green eyes locked with mine in a way that made my legs feel like they might disassemble and give way beneath the weight of my flustering pounding heart. I tried to smile a little bit, but he just kept watching me. It felt like it took an infinite amount of time just to pass by that house on that particular day. I didn't stop, just kept walking, just kept feeling his eyes on me. The image of his face haunted me mercilessly nearly every waking hour and I listened to "Fascination" again and again, remembering his transfixed expression and perpetuating that intense feeling of excitement and curiosity.

When I saw him again he approached me. I was at the laundromat. He asked me my name and when I told him, he repeated it back to me like it was the sexiest name he had ever heard in his life. Then he told me his name. When he said it I felt like it was the sexiest name that I had ever heard in my life and the way his gaze penetrated mine was completely unique to me. My hands trembled uncontrollably every time he came near me. The sound of his voice and the color of his eyes hung like a shadow over me, even in sleep. I couldn't shake it. Couldn't dispell the grip that he had on me. He bound me up in my own infatuation and then he went on to pursue other conquests. The person he pursued and conquered was my good friend. I watched them fall in love with eachother and moved on, but in the meantime he continued to torment me. Sometimes he would hug her and he would look at me over her shoulder and lock into my eyes in the cruel way that said he knew what I was feeling and he enjoyed it.

He was the one who introduced me to that song "I'd Rather Be With You." Sometimes when we were all in the car on the way to the lake in the summertime that song would come on and every word felt like a paper cut, but I loved the song so much, despite the sadness and dejection that I felt inside whenever I heard it. I dated other guys, but whenever that song played, it was the same thing... I'd rather be with you.

It seems funny that a couple of years ago, when I was moving to New York from the west coast, I said goodbye to that black-haired, green-eyed boy - by that time I had long overcome my desire to possess him - and he seemed to have lost all of the magic that held me so captive one day when I was that young thing on my way to have coffee with my friends after school. I wonder now what it would feel like to see him today. What would we say? Would we laugh about the way things were? I think I would...

Posted by Maria at February 4, 2003 02:43 PM | TrackBack