I'm driving home from Richmond tonight and it's just long enough a road trip that I've gone through all the regular CDs and grown tired of Tori. It's at the point where I start to filter through the stack and find something random and underneath Best of Morrisey I find the mix of Summer 2000. It's schizophrenic and begins with songs I discovered while addicted to Dawson's Creek Season 3: The Joey & Pacey Years, and ends with The Beastie Boys, Billy Joel, and Janet Jackson. So I'm skipping around and stop on Sinead O'Connor's "Jealous" and I don't really even like Sinead and her politics back in the day made me tired but for some reason this tune was the kind that required repeat and I remember driving across the country with Dad and listening to this CD over and over as many times as I could without him noticing, and then when he would go inside to check in the motel for the night I would sit in the Honda and listen to this song - track 12 - as many times as it took for him to come back to the car. And tonight when it starts in the same car I remember the time in Illinois when the air was heavy, heavy with the summer heat of the Mississippi and there were hundreds of crickets and the windows were sweating and tonight I almost can't breathe, remembering.
Because today it's almost three years and a whole lot of living later, but I can still taste and smell and feel how I was so scared to be running away from whatever and was full of surface confidence but not much else. And now it's been three years of just me and complicated and dynamic friendships with girls that aren't a good substitute for where we really want to belong. And it doesn't always feel quite so much like desperation, but tonight, I remember that track 17 is "Round Here," and the first minute can break my heart and so I skip backwards over and over again while eating popcorn as fast as I can to stop myself from crying.
It's not even like I'm really sad, it's just that these songs make me feel like I'm in a movie and it's time to cry and reveal what's really in the heroine's head, down deep. It's like one hour and 20 minutes in and we're ready for the truth to come out and she can admit she loves the boy. It's like how when I'm driving in my car with someone and there's an awkward pause in the conversation, but the radio's on mute, I start to whistle or hum this one bar from some movie - I can't remember which one, even - and I can practically see John Williams raise his baton and start the trumpets and the violins.
I love that about songs. I love how every time I hear "When It's Love" it's the Van Halen summer and I'm in the Buick with the windows down driving down Menlo Avenue to take Erin home and speed back to make curfew.
If this all really were a movie, I like to think George Winston scored it in the form of "The Venice Dreamer, Part II," and around about minute 3:15 it all starts to make sense.
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