Something 4 The Weekend # 67

I may have told this story before...

It was early on a Sunday morning, circa May 1994, and Sweetpea and I were laying in bed, talking, tickling, making out - doing the sorts of things loving couples do in bed on a lazy Sunday morning, and we were listening to the radio on the boombox sitting on the nightstand, when Cat Stevens' "Wild World" started playing...

We lay there silently then, listening to the song, and I was suddenly overcome by a very real sadness...The lyrics of the song led me to a very substantial realization that Sweetpea and I weren't destined to be together forever...She was 20 at the time, and I was 28, and our lives simply weren't in sync...We loved each other, I'm sure of that, but she was young, and had so much of the world to see and experience, whereas I had done plenty of travelling and living by that point in my life...My experiences, and my perceptions of the world were mostly alien to her, and she couldn't stay with me, in that place, forever...She had to strike out on her own, see the world, make her own memories, and get to a place in her life that more closely mirrored my own at that time...

I believe that Sweetpea had the same realization in that moment, because as the song played, she held me, tighter and tighter, as if a hug could push away that sense of inevitability...She knew as well as I did that Sunday morning that she had to move out into the wild world without me...

As it happened, Sweetpea and I dated and lived together for another two years, despite the fact that we both knew it wasn't going to last...As if we were going to try and squeeze the most goodness out of our relationship as we could, while we could...

Frightened Rabbit: The Midnight Organ Fight: "Old Old Fashioned" [mp3]

She drunk dialed me about five years ago, in the middle of the night, and left a fairly lengthy message on my answering machine about missing me, and how cool I was, and how much she and her friends liked my music (Sweetpea and I dated during my most prolific and artistic years as a 4-track "lo-fi pioneer"), and when I listened back to her message the next morning, I was struck again by that same feeling of sadness I had that Sunday morning in 1994...The idea that we were good together, and maybe could have gone the distance if circumstances had been different...

Of course, one could argue the idea that the simple fact that we didn't stay together is proof that we weren't good enough together, and never would have gone the distance no matter what the circumstances...The idea that love conquers all...

Sometimes I think she may one day ring my doorbell, straight out of the blue, in 2014, and prove once and for all that we were soul mates of a sort, but of course, that will never happen because we weren't soul mates, and life typically doesn't get more romantic than a drunk voicemail at 2am...

I hope she's made alot of nice friends out there, wherever she is in this wild world.

Hotcha! Hank