It was you, breathless and torn

Thanks to SoapNet airing O.C. reruns I became reacquainted with an old song and WHAMMO! I was back in The Regency apartment 52 with 5 other girls listening to it on repeat and I almost couldn't breathe. Musically, there's not a lot going on: the guitar is just broken chords, sometimes minor, and the vocal stays within one octave and mostly repeats the same note, but the echo and white space make it hypnotic, and when you leave it on repeat, it's easy to miss where it ends and begins, like a circular daydream.

Not unlike then, my 19th and 20th years, today has been a repeat day and I can taste and smell and see everything in that place - the weird low-pile industrial carpeting, multi-colored Christmas lights in T's and my bedroom, the vaguely musty left bathroom with no shower, just a tub, the overly bright flourescent bulbs in the kitchen, making that boy frozen (frozen!) stir-fry with Yoshida sauce late one night and chatting with him about serious things like fiction and the gospel at the kitchen table, almost fainting because he called me Lis . . . I read a book recently where the main character, a woman in her 90s, was sent in and out of reveries throughout the narrative, and it occured to me that I have become not unlike an old woman, reliving parts of my twenties with no small amount of being overwhelmed and full of . . . regret? Maybe. Sometimes just fondness, wistfulness . . . sometimes plain joy. I'm not sure I'm old enough for that to be appropriate, but nonetheless, Mazzy Star starts her singing and I don't have any defense against it.