Soundtrack for a Break-Up

My first high school boyfriend ended our relationship in a most spectacular way. He spent a semester in South Africa, returning to regale his friends in the dorm with stories of his trysts.  His friends. Also my friends, who quickly told me what was going on.

The first chance we got to talk about it was when he was in the hospital shortly after his boastful return—did he have a pulmonary embolism? do people live through those? a blood clot somewhere else? I recall it being serious, a clot, and probably related to travel—anyway, I was pretty heartbroken but felt badly being angry because he had apparently been so close to death.

The rest of that semester, running back from the boat docks after practice each afternoon, I hit rewind over and over on my Walkman to listen to one Morrissey song. He was decidedly not cool in our crowd, so I have no idea how I even found it. It must have been the newness of it, knowing it didn’t belong to anyone else.

The path back from the docks was a fairly gentle but steady slope up. I usually walked back with my rowers, but in those intense months immediately following the break-up, I recall running as fast as I could to pound the hurt out of my body.

This time, as the person making the break, different music has risen to the top. I feel like some songs are accusing me of not trying hard enough, and some are telling me I won’t find what I had (assuming that’s what I’m looking for, which …) or taunting me that it’s too late to find whatever it is I really do.

But for the most part, I’m rolling around in music that I’ve not listened to for a long time, enjoying it without having to worry about, or listen to, what someone else thinks about it.

It opens up doors to who I used to be, someone I had put away and not bothered to look for in a long time. I’m singing and dancing and crying into the sadness and the bliss.

A high school friend, rather out of the blue, encouraged me to go see Dead & Company in Austin one weekend. What a gift he gave me by reaching out. I was feeling it so deeply, smiling so widely, that my cheeks were sore not even midway through the show.

That’s the difference this time. Then, I was focused on saying goodbye to someone, putting up a front of juvenile bravado while worrying who I’d be without him. Now, I’m turning emotions back on for myself—and they’re bubbling out in all sorts of ways I had forgotten they could, effervescent and scalding and cooling and pricking and buoying me up and swirling me under and I am singing singing singing all the time.