There's nothing quite like the sound of Aretha Franklin's "So Long" while the rain pours outside your open window as your tea steeps like subway steam. Outside of the dark and the relentless rain, I have my thoughts and a lamp that looks like something you would find on the black clothed tables of Birdland Jazz club off of Broadway in New York City. I wish I were there now.
On this night, as I listen to the trills of Aretha's piano and can see lightening cry in the far distance like a cymbal, I think about love. I am dwelling on it, like most women do when they are completely alone.
My only sister is an apparent eight years younger than myself. She is now in a relationship which she perceives as lasting "forever." Young love. Despite the length of her shorts (if you can call them that), and her inability to eat in his presence, I find that the anticipation she and her boyfriend share in simply seeing one another, is rather lovely. It's precious, really. The very idea that she might not be able to see him today because she didn't own a helmet to peddle her bicycle to his house nearly brought her to tears. Within minutes of having woken up. Although I laughed out loud at hearing her voice crack as she demanded that she and my mother needed to leave the house "immediately for a helmet", I thought the ordeal incredibly sweet as I buttered my bagel.
In that moment, I could recall my desperation, at sixteen, to see the one whom I thought I would spend "forever" with. And to be frank, he fully believed and treated me as if he and I would one day marry. There is no one as eager as a sixteen year old boy to prove himself, especially to his first love.
Anytime I felt lonely, anytime I worried a tissue to shreds, anytime I doubted my own strength or beauty, he would be outside of my window within minutes. Every day was a special occasion. Every month was an anniversary. That experience; the experience of being "in love" at sixteen, was certainly, in retrospect, the most memorable, warm, and humorous experience of my life. To be doted on was wildly attractive to me. And yet, when we did not see one another for a few days, it was an eternity and our laughter would consume empty spaces in the dead of night over telephone wire. Young love is a beautiful thing; you are determined to keep the happiness you've found and the feeling that someone has chosen you, over all others, to share his/her deepest secrets and kisses. You are determined to make it work because it's the first time you've felt really alive and appreciated. The first time someone has told you the details of your body or mind or soul before you've even considered them yourself or were even aware of them. The first time someone looked and treated your life as a beautiful thing. Who wouldn't want to feel that forever?
Oddly, and comically enough, I have found that since one's first love, the details of one's design matter less and one's undesigned future matters more. I think this is what is precious about young first love; two people are absorbed in one another's identities.
As an adult, in an "adult relationship"; your identity evolves from what your favourite colour, melody, place, book, words, people, films, restaurants, activities and things are to what you do for a living, how you spend your money, and with whom you spend your time with. We grow up heady and to have concise goals. To be determined and focused on a future that doesn't exist. Nobody notices the identical moles you have on either side of your torso or listens to Coltrane or Franklin because you do. Those days will never happen again. You will never be new porcelain.
When you're an adult, romance is compromised. It begins to not exist because who has time for romance? And is it really that important? Can't we talk about it later? Don't be selfish. Big deal. Don't play the victim. Every thing's fine.
These words don't exist in the dictionary of two sixteen year old people. They're too afraid to lose what they have; fresh pangs of love and vitality.
But you crave the romance or even the idea of it as you reach your mid twenties. The romance or memory of Birdland Jazz Club on Broadway or Aretha Franklin on a rainy night are vital to you now. These places and sounds validate your existence and ability to feel extraordinary. We all want to feel extraordinary. Sixteen or Sixty, we can't let romance or ourselves perish into the abyss that is loneliness and preoccupation. It's simply unnatural to live without romance or harbour empty cocoons in pit of your stomach. How to grow a butterfly and reverse those wrinkles...never a wasted mission.
