I associate songs to certain periods of my life. Taylor Swift’s “Red” was the baseball player’s era: late nights, sitting in the stands with thick purple blankets and matching mittens, fighting over video games vs. a night out with friends, and my first time cooking pot roast. I heard that song shortly after we broke up the first time. I was driving on I-80 and I turned it up so loud it rattled the car windows. I sang the chorus to my audience of stuffed animals en route home from college, might have even cried too. Even now, I can’t hear the song without remembering that clear sunny day, that highway, the gritty taste of baseball diamond dirt.
The high school crush was “Sky is the Limit” by Jason Derulo. I can still picture him just as he was, standing in the middle of my quiet street in sweats and a backwards hat, blasting the song from his mother’s fancy red car and candles in the shape of the words ‘Homecoming?’ Whenever I hear it, I’m reminded of noodle dates and the stupid things we used to do, like drawing a line of chalk for a mile around his neighborhood or watching an entire season of ‘John and Kate Plus 8’ in one sitting. Now the song makes me laugh about how young we were, how much has changed since then.
There are hundreds of songs in my head for the man I love now. A song for the time the two of us and his son sang at the top of our lungs on a back road, one of the first times we spent a weekend together. A song for when we stayed up way too late, talking about nothing. A song for our first kiss. A song he texted me the lyrics to, saying that it reminded him of me. A song overplayed on the radio that can’t help but make me smile because each and every time I feel like he’s with me.
Love has always come to me in the form of music. Melodies that echo in my head, songs that wrap themselves around my heart and connect myself to someone else. I have a song associated to every major memory, to every significant person in my life. But falling, falling is different. Falling in love is when a song makes me smile when I’m alone in my bedroom, eyes closed, just letting the music fill the space around me. Falling in love is when I can’t stop humming, when I can’t stop singing, when I get chills just hearing the song’s opening beats. Falling in love is seeing the person’s face and remembering the how his hand feels in mine, how warm his chest is, how alive and perfect I felt in that moment – in every moment with him.
Falling in love is when that song becomes your song, and you know you’ll never get tired of that tune.
Featured Image Credit: Toa Heftiba
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