The Broken-Hearted Lovers Mix

 I found it stashed away, where it has been for the past 20 years, our faces on the cover, smiling into the lens of future unwritten. A timestamp, proof of a life lived and shared, nothing quite like the grin of ignorance. Who can foretell the path life will take when you're young and the whole world seems at the tip of your fingers? So eager to hit the ground running. I don't know that girl anymore, in truth, I can hardly remember her, but wasn't she beautiful? A mess and so broken, so young and naive, such childlike wonder. Was it her brokenness you loved, a desire to heal her with your heart? I try to conjure her and pull her to me, but I cannot recognize her in my face. As much as I try to recall, she eludes me in mocking as I desperately try to grasp at the blurred fragments of memory in my mind, whispering the hints of a life that used to be and the woman I once was. I so long to be closer to her. 

Only...there is not so much that I can recall from this time. Oh how fragile a thing of youth and how unprepared for life! 

The things I can remember are minute: your sparkling blue eyes, tearful, passionate, intoxicated. Oh how they drew me in, like I was lost at sea. I've always been a sucker for eyes like yours. Why were we drinking? Late at the park, I can remember the swings, it was a muggy summer night. To this day, those are my most favorite kind. You swore your love for me, a passion professed eternal. HA and how naive to think a love like that could endure! How has life shaped you now? Does your heart still love so intensely?

Reflecting exposes so much. The wide open expanse of blank slate on whole life left to live. What could truly be known of love? Do you still chase a love like that or, like the aged, has that flame dimmed? And do you know what you are looking for, can one really ever know? I have searched in places high and lowered myself to the dark recesses of urine stenched back-alleys to find it...or something like it. I still prefer life at night, so eerie in stillness, the darkness. I have suffered abuses at the hands of so-called lovers, longing to be held in the tender caress of something that finally felt safe. It was never safe. 

I have drunk myself to stupors and only scarcely have survived and lived to tell the tale, but I only sound like a raving madman, recovered after a time, lost at sea wherefore abandoned by his mind.

How does one convey those tales of desperation? The level of soul searching which can only come long after one has locked themself inside a bottle, trading every ounce of self respect for charcuterie of substances all meant to induce a momentary shallow in that vastness of feeling? Merely...slight relief from pain and delaying the inevitable agony that comes far too soon with withdrawal. Sometimes I crave it still, the euphoric oblivion save from the anguish and torment of my doing. 

This was the last musical mix I received from a love, the last of the love letters too. The years to follow, brought more heartache and confusion. Doomed, I'm sure, to a curse of my own making. Will I never be satisfied? No one had made me feel more beautiful, before or since. I remember the terror of living a life in your shadow that absolutely haunted me and drew me into hiding. From what, from whom...afraid to know myself. A fear of living up to the woman I could have become. 

I have had years to craft the woman I want to be, shape her into a living, breathing real girl. Perhaps yet, never to become. Everyday growing both closer and further away as the tide of my perceptions and ideals rises and falls with the rhythm of the moon; sometimes boldly illuminating the path, clear for all to see, yet on the other: pitch black, unseen, leaving me to feel my way blindly through the dark and stumbling. It all makes perfect sense doesn't it? 

This soundtrack from that life evokes all those old familiar feelings and a depth of intensity that would terrify a lesser man. No surprise I was drawn to oblivion, the impossibility of myself to keep up with me. Daunting isn't it? 

What power music can hold, how it can transform and transport you, how it can remind you of things you've long and otherwise forgotten. It brings to mind the taste of my first Rueben and your eager urging for me to try something new. I always valued your excitement to lead, to teach, and show me new things and I so appreciated that about you. I still seek that out in people and in many ways, I am still that naive little girl, discovering life as things unfold, marveling at the wonder in the subtle beauty in the things around, yet now cresting on 40 years. Wild how that can be and how fast time catches up with you.  

Do you know, I can still drive a stick? It's something else you taught me. I recall those lessons affectionately, like my first times riding a bike--a valuable but scarcely used skill. And all of those secluded places you used to take me, showing me old townie charms, convincing me to fall in love with this place, here and now...they are now overrun with Others whose abundant presence brings to me a bitterness at their intrusion of a place and time so tender. Their disregard of that past feels like a stolen secret, mowing over the beautiful gardens of my past, nothing looks the same. Nothing stays. 

Your biggest lesson remains one of my strongest coping mechanisms to date: sunshine and music. It was a light in the torrential downpour of storms in my mind, revolutionary in thought at the time, both progressive and unfathomable. It gave me hope in the darkest winters of my life.

I cannot recall our dreams or plans or who it was we wanted to be. I hardly know who I used to be, though I don’t think I knew yet then. What did we desire of this life? Did we share a dream? I wonder what comes in the next 20 years, which of these memories will fade even further out of reach? How many more lives will take shape through the evolution of our incarnation? I eagerly look to the future, fast forward, towards an unknown version of myself yet to be and I hope to love her still.