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May 20, 2005

Billie Jean is not my lover

The first time around, the end of the first marriage, it was lyrics. Even though my whole life I'd always been able to learn the words to songs right away, and effortlessly (my one talent), suddenly I couldn't do it any more. It took almost two years for that to come back. I had moved across the country, had gotten divorced, had started another life, and I was driving down Fell Street in San Francisco one afternoon when turned on the radio and started singing along.

This time around, the end but not quite the end; the end but something else, maybe; the end and nothing else, maybe, I can't seem to read any more. Doesn't matter what: novels, short stories--they're never short enough--newspaper articles, even the comics page, it's all just too involved, the words just make me nervous and anxious. My eyes ... I don't know. I can't make them stay where I want them. They skitter across the words, skip sentences, paragraphs, from the top of the page to the middle to the bottom and back again.

I love to read, and now I can't read. Well, I can't read for pleasure. Since I read for a living I can force myself to pay attention, and somehow language about practitioners and providers and MCOs and MBHOs and PPOs sticks on the page instead of blurring out and flying off in all directions. Or I stick to it, anyway.

But even though I've lost--for a while anyway--a great love, this time around song lyrics play a part as well; now it's all lyrics, all the time. I can't read, but I can listen. And I do. The three or four minutes it takes to hear a song is a world of time: enough to tell somebody's life story or all about the end of a love affair or how much I want you, baby, and I can't get enough. Now I not only hear the words, I hear them, I listen fervently, fervidly, avidly, to song lyrics, honing in on the meaning, the message; it must be how people feel when they pray, listening for the distant voice of God.

I dive brain first into songs and let myself float around in them, let the words seep in. I don't even need to sing along. I get in the car, put a cd on and turn it up, up, up, turn it up until there isn't anything else in the world but me the music and the beat and the stories.

And this: I found that if I concentrate a little now I see the lyrics as well as hear them. Drifting past my mind's eye in endless variation: baroque, modern, curlicued italics, scribbles ... and all the words seem to speak directly to me and inform my life, all of them.

Sometimes when I wake up in the middle of the night I can hear a song playing in the background of my thoughts, like a soundtrack. Some songs get stuck in my head and play for days--Criminal, by Fiona Apple; Crown of Love, by Arcade Fire; 23, by Jimmy Eat World; Peter Pan, by Patti Griffin--but I'm not especially faithful to any of them; I love whatever loves me. And everything I hear loves me these days. It's perfect, the perfect relationship: just me and the floating, soaring, searing lyrics, it's just us for just as long as it takes. Just to the end of the street. Just into the city. Just to the grocery store. Just until the next track. Just until reading comes back. Just until life starts again.

Posted by JudyLa at 11:30 PM | Comments (0)