"The Truth Of Love In Songs..."

He and I, we never really had a "song," but if we would've I can think of the one that came the closest to being the song I'd remember as it...

I recall us sitting to together in the Florida room, it was a crisp autumn day, and he was sitting in the chair next to the palm tree and I was sitting across from him.  He was listening to music on his iPod, while reading for work and I was just gazing into the face I'd come to love as I didn't love even my self.  He looked up and saw my admiring gaze and put down his work and asked me about the music I liked.  I was thrilled that he wanted to know me and so I opened by laptop and played some of my favorite songs and artists for him. 

He was a bit stunned that I loved Roger Whittaker and when I told him that he was probably the only artist I had any interest in seeing in concert, he said to me, "Someday, we'll see him together..." I don't think he ever realized that I had just shared with him one of the most precious desires of my heart, and that he'd just promised me a dream that I had held in my heart for all of my adult life. I played him my favorite Roger Whittaker tune and he seemed to like it too.  It was a song almost as old as us, 1969's "Dirty Old Town," a song set in Salford, England that could have just as easily been about our hometown of Detroit.

I also played some songs for him that were more contemporary (at least to us at the time), and when I got to Nena's "Ninety Nine Red Balloons," we discovered one that was a youthful favorite of us both.  He asked me to send him the mp3 so he could put it on his iPod. As we listened we laughed and talked of how we'd both grown up in the shadows of the cold war and how this song resonated with so many facets of our lives.  He was surprised when I told him that I preferred the German language version of the song "99 Luftballons," and when I played it for him, he said he liked it better too. We both seemed so happy in that little discovery, that if I had to choose a song that we could've called "our song' this would be it.  Little did we know how metaphorically this tune would come to describe our own intense relationship.

Then bravely, I shared what for me at that time had only recently become a new found love for Nina Simone... I played him the track that had introduced me to her and that had entranced me like no other recording before or since... The first time I heard it was while driving home from work late one night.  At the time, this was just a few years before coming out and before meeting him and before ever dreaming that love could be real in my life. I recalled to him how I was moved to tears and I shared with him how I was so powerfully affected by her haunting performance that I had to pull off the road and how I literally shook with deep emotion as the tears streamed from my eyes while sitting in a cold, dark and empty parking lot in the middle of the night... 

While telling my story of hearing "Just Like A Woman" for the first time and as I looked into his eyes, I realized that I had thrown open a window to my heart and had given him his first glimpse of the shadows that were hidden deep in the recesses of my soul and of the lonely brokenness that loving him had so magically swept away.  As I played other tracks from her repertoire, I could see he felt the same connection to her music that I did.  Within a week of two of that day, I would gift to him her "Baltimore" album which features the track I told him expressed my every hope and desire for us...

Whenever I hear this pleading love song, I'm reminded that his promises to me were of all these things and I remember that for a time, it was really like this.

I am always remembering, and my greatest fear is that I may not live long enough to forget...

"Fear Eats the Soul"