Songs We Remember: Part I

Songs We Remember

PART I

words Liesel Schmidt image ssuaphotos/Shutterstock

I’VE ALWAYS THOUGHT it amazing how music can conjure a memory from the recesses of your brain, reminding you of one very specific moment in time, whether that moment brings you joy or pain as you recall it. I have many of those songs, many of those moments, creating a soundtrack for my life that I don’t seem to be able to escape.

So many of my memories are set to song, like making out with a boyfriend in the cab of his shiny black Dodge Ram 1500 while Maroon 5 sang “She Will Be Loved.” It was a short-lived romance that burned hot and fast, eventually coming to an end when I realized that we were too different to sustain anything lasting. And listening to Colin Hay croon the lamenting words of “Waiting for My Real Life to Begin,” I remember sitting on the floor of a darkened apartment in my bridesmaid’s dress while the song played on the stereo, wishing that the young pilot sitting next to me would realize that he loved me. Coldplay’s “Yellow” brings a flashback of sitting in a truck

a year later with a man I barely knew but knew I was falling in love with, driving on an ill-fated trip to watch the space shuttle launch that didn’t happen at Cape Canaveral, just one song on a CD that played softly in the background over the course of an hours-long trip to nowhere and back. Another year later, “You’re Beautiful” became a song that reminded me that that same man would never love me back, James Blunt’s voice like a knife through my heart as the words sang out whenever his black Motorola Razr received calls from a girlfriend that wasn’t me.

But when he finally kissed me—there was no music for that. There were only heartbeats. Maybe that’s a good thing: no song to bring that moment back. Because that one night was just that—one night, stolen and only mine for an instant. In the next instant it was gone, replaced by harsh reality when I knocked on his door expecting to see him and came face-to-face with a woman instead.

There wasn’t music for that moment, either. If it had been a movie, there would have been some sad song growing steadily louder as I turned away, heartbroken and confused, to walk back to my car.

“Annie!” I heard my name being called, but it sounded far away. “Annie, wait!”

I stopped and turned to face the man I’d come to see, man who had held my heart in his hands for two years and had toyed so carelessly with it, saying with his words that we could only be friends and all the while acting as though we could be more. And now it was truly broken, shattered like glass into a thousand shards.

“Wait?” I asked incredulously, feeling the hot sting of tears in my throat. “Wait for what, Jack? Clearly, you’re busy. I shouldn’t have come—or maybe you just want to say that I should have called first,” I said, humiliation crashing over me like a wave that could pull me into oblivion at any moment. “I should have known better. I should have known.” I shook my head and laughed at my own stupidity. “You warned me. Didn’t you? You told me, but I went ahead and hoped that you would love me the way that I love you.” “I’m sorry, Annie,” he said, his warm brown eyes filled with something that looked to me like pity.

“Don’t,” I said, reaching up to swipe at the tears that were creeping down my face.

“Don’t do that. Just go back inside and forget that I was ever here.” I turned on my heel and took the last steps to my car, feeling his eyes on me the whole way. I drove away in silence, desperate to escape whatever music would become the soundtrack of my pain.

“You’re going to stare a hole through that menu if you look at it any harder, honey.” There was a slight accent to the raspy voice, a Southern drawl that placed its origin somewhere in Georgia with a two-pack-a-day habit.

I looked up to see a middle-aged woman in a white blouse and black skirt, the nametag pinned to her chest declaring that her name was Wanda. Her grey-streaked brown hair was swept into a messy bun, and she was holding an order pad in her left hand, her pen poised and ready while she stood beside me. The arched eyebrow and slight smirk she wore suggested that she’d been standing there for more than a minute.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” I said, feeling my face flush with embarrassment. “I was just thinking.”

“Clearly. But let me tell you, there’s nothing on that menu worth that much thought. Just go with the turkey sandwich unless you’re an adventurous eater,” she said with a wink, giving me a quick flash of the green eye shadow on her eyelid.

“Noted. I’m really not hungry, though.” I cocked my head and gave her an apologetic look. “Just coffee for me,” I said, handing her the menu.

Wanda took my menu with an understanding smile and walked away, heading toward the beverage station to pour my coffee. I had little hope that it would be even marginally drinkable, but I wasn’t really here for the coffee, either.

More than a decade later, I was here to remember.

The year had been a stressful one, one that left me taking out old memories and examining them from every angle. It had also opened old wounds that hadn’t ever healed properly.

I stared at the empty seat across from me in the booth, its vinyl worn and faded with some of its stuffing escaping from rips near the seams. If I tried hard enough, I could almost reach out and touch the young pilot who had once sat there telling me about his family and where he’d grown up. I could watch his hands move as he spoke, hear the strange way that he said “water” and the sound of his laugh. Just like now, it had been creeping toward Thanksgiving, and the dark night air outside the restaurant had been chilled. I remembered looking out the window at the lit street and wondering if this was him.

He had been everything I’d imagined; and over the next year, he’d had me at his beck and call. Until that night as Colin Hay’s words washed over his darkened apartment and I knew he would never give me the love that I needed.

I shook my head to clear the tears that were starting to cloud my vision. He’d been the one who had broken me first, the one I’d hung so many hopes on. And here I was, so many years later, still stinging from the pain I had felt— still the woman who had given her heart over and over only to find that she was in love alone. “Please tell me you didn’t.” The incredulity on my sister’s face was as clear as a billboard as she sat across from me in her living room, her legs tucked under her. She leaned forward and squinted as though she was trying to read me.

I grimaced and shifted uncomfortably in my seat, sinking back further into the mountain of pillows that surrounded me on the couch. “I did.”

“Oh, God, Annie! Why?” Her voice went up several octaves.

“Shhhhh!” I widened my eyes at her. “You’ll wake up the kids, and I know how hard you worked to get them down for their nap, Mags.”

She raised an eyebrow at me and pursed her lips. “Way to deflect. Now tell me what in the actual he—” she stopped short and took a breath, eyeing the Swear Jar that seemed to be quickly accumulating money. “What were you thinking?”

“I was thinking that it’s been sixteen years,” I said with a shrug, trying to look more casual than I felt. “I was thinking that I’ve always wondered where he is and what he’s doing, and if he’s married or…or…” I trailed off, not sure that I trusted myself to finish the sentence.

“Or waiting for you?” Maggie said softly, her blue eyes cast down at the empty coffee cup she’d been toying with. A hank of her blonde hair had slipped out of the messy topknot on her head, and it fluttered as she breathed.

As I stared at her, I realized I was doing it again, after almost two decades. I was here again. I hadn’t realized I’d begun to cry until the first tears hit the pillow in my lap.

Read the finale of Songs We Remember, in our January issue.