Sometimes I Forget

I found myself, tonight, listening to my music again. Music, which to me used to be as crucial for life as water and oxygen, is a rare indulgence anymore; too much has happened since then. When the things you love are used against you, used as weapons to cut you down and make you doubt yourself, it's sometimes hard to love them again even after the one who wielded them as weapons is long gone; CR has been out of my life for six years this spring, and yet weeks sometimes go by where I don't turn on the radio, or click on Windows Media, or pop in my earbuds. What makes that more of a sin to me is this: music was one of my deepest connections with JP, and one of my most superficial commonalities with CR. Where CR inflicted music on me, JP and I communed through music, on a level beyond anything CR would ever have been able to comprehend. In bludgeoning me with his views, CR stole from me one of the things I could least afford to lose: yet another connection to JP and what we had together.

Tonight, though, there was nothing on TV, and so while I did some Wikipedia-ing and priced out shelving for my hallway closet, I clicked on one of my playlists and listened.

In the constant psychic effort to fend off things I can't handle, not to think about things I don't have the energy to think about clearly, I find that I've fenced out a lot of good memories as well. All of them, really; the good memories were really all there was. (Firefly remembers things differently, I know; she tells me of phone calls near the end, in the weeks before JP's death, where I spoke of arguments, of things not going well. I remember one argument clearly; I remember a sense of growing stress, but as I remember it, the stress was about the situation and not about the relationship. We were both scared, was the long and short of it.) Listening to some of the songs I've managed to find at last--some online, some on eBay, here and there and everywhere--I remember moments I've choked back down for years; I find myself sitting here and thinking This...THIS is why I'm not looking anymore. This is why I'm okay with being alone--because there isn't anyone who would understand exactly what's so wonderful about these songs. In almost thirteen years I haven't found another man who would listen to, say, "Silence" by Delerium, and find it sexy. JP would have understood immediately; that's one of the songs I regret he never got to hear.

And it's not me, I don't think; I don't believe I'm taking an extraordinarily-pessimistic view of things. It's not that I just haven't FOUND that man; it's that I truly believe that he DOES NOT EXIST. He did, once. I know this for a fact, and I don't just mean JP. There were a lot of guys like JP, to a greater or (mostly) lesser degree. But that was back in 1990, 1992, 1995. By 1997 they were an endangered species; by 2000 they were extinct, completely. They were married, the good ones, the ones who hadn't skated close enough to the edge to be sucked down; the other ones were lost, or fighting their way out of some dream-world, struggling back out into reality, blinking at the sunlight. When they emerged they found what I found: scorched earth. Limp Bizkit, Starbucks, Howard Stern, Jackass. Kid Rock and Korn and the jock-ocracy resurgent, Rush Limbaugh and woman-hating and gay-bashing, Fox "News" and millions of SUV's on every block, and 24-hour-a-day celebrity scandals crawling across the bottom of every screen for miles around.

I can only wonder, sometimes, at whatever force managed to keep me sober. Those years were a horror-show for anyone who remembered when it was okay for men to feel; when you could turn on a rock station and hear a woman's voice singing; when it really, really wasn't acceptable to spew hate as though it were spray-paint. The wonder is that I didn't crawl back into my warm heroin blankets and refuse to emerge forever. The only answer I have to offer is, I didn't realize exactly how bad it was. I knew it was bad; I just thought it would get better, is all.

It has, a little--but only a little. I'm not decrying every tiny little change that's taken place since 1994; I'm not even claiming that I was impervious to change myself. I listen to songs now, the lyrics of which would have sent me into screeching horrors back in my days with JP; which probably would have sent JP off the edge too, come to think of it. (Sometimes I think about some things I know of JP's past, how he'd been treated by females through his life, and I wonder in some dark heretical corner of my mind if maybe HE would have become part of this nightmare, eventually; if maybe the things that were done and said to him by women might not have driven him to the place where it was all right to call women "bitches" and "hos". I like to think not; mostly I think not. I wonder who this world would have made him, sometimes.) And there are good things too; blogs, for example. JP would have adored blogs; when he died, the world was just starting to grasp the opportunities of the Internet, although it really wasn't "The Internet" per se, back then--it was just a little bunch of dial-up, pay-by-the-hour online services, but I found them fascinating, and he was caught up in my enthusiasm. The thought of being able to find music from tiny obscure bands and listen to it on the computer...oh, that would have been JP's idea of heaven, and if one of those bands had been HIS?

But I think he would have been discouraged, as I am; the hate outweighs the hope, and the ways in which some of the pendulums have swung backwards would have saddened him, I know. The current political climate, especially here in Chicago, would have sickened him; what passes for intelligent discourse would have horrified him. I don't think he would have been a very happy man, had he lived, and that alone makes me very sad--that thought that maybe he was better off, the way things happened.

I spend a lot of time thinking about things like that, when I think of JP, because those are the kinds of things I can bear to think about. Those are the safe thoughts, the ones that won't make me cry, at least not on a good day. But there are the other thoughts, too, the ones that come upon me when I least expect it, or when I'm listening to music; when a song comes with a crystal-clear memory attached, and I'm forced to think about some moment I'll never have again. Or a reminder of what might have been--not the pessimist's version I've drawn to comfort myself, but the best-case scenario, the kind of thing we dreamed for ourselves a thousand times a day, when we were together; or sometimes just an acknowledgement, the kind you can't do anything with or anything about, the kind I've forced back for what feels like forever: ...god, that man was special.