The girl with my song.

When I was 21 I dated this girl who was gaga about rhythm and blues. She loved Boyz to Men and to be specific, Shawn Stockman. She thought Shawn was the shit. I thought Shawn had a shitty hairstyle. I remember buying her the album Evolution (they came in the form of tapes back those days when god was a boy). For weeks on end she listened to little else but that tape.

Here is the thing; she is the only girl I ever dated who listened to music with her eyes closed. You haven’t dated until you have dated a chick who listens to music with her eyes closed gentlemen (Ben, you better be taking notes). She would sit on the settee with her legs folded away under her, and she would listen to the track To the limit over and over again, all the while her head flung back on the chair and eyes closed. And when this happened she would block everything out for that moment and recede into a world that only belonged to her, a world that only she could fully contemplate. And when she adopted this poise she cast

an avatar of mystery a representation of something deeply erotic. At least to me, look I was young and highly impressionable after all.

Suffice to say such moments were confusing for me, confusing in that even though I found her sexily unreachable, I was embarrassed to accept that I felt lonely at her leaving with Shawn, Wanya, Mike and Nathan, lonely because she had excluded me from this intimate journey to the neverland of music. But also those moments were animatedly intimate because for the time Shawn crooned in her ears I lost her. Completely. She was gone…gone, baby, gone. For the moments Wanya hit the notes with that trademark falsetto, I knew she was not mine, that she would never be mine as long as those guys were singing. Oh how I wished I could sing.

By the way, this is the kind of post that puts me in the doghouse with the powers that be. Writing about another woman in this fashion is just the kind of thing that will earn me “the sulk” for days because it implies that I miss another woman. It implies that I still burn a candle for her. Well, nothing could be further from the truth. I hate candles, candles are dangerous, and they can start a fire. I’m writing this now because it’s contextualized to the story I’m about to tell. The story of this ex simply offers an irresistible entry point. Nothing less. There isn’t some raging romance brewing on the sly with her. No candles on my side of the pond. Last I heard from her was eight years ago when she had rang me from a telephone booth at the airport to say goodbye with a voice that shimmered and trembled with rife emotion. Then poof, she was gone!

But here is the story I really wanted to tell.

I saw this kid in the morning traffic sometime back as I headed to town. She must have been 4 or 5. She was in one of those yellow school buses that we all want our kids to ride in one day. Whilst the other kids in the bus were being jumpy and mischievous (like only kids can be) she sat lifelessly in her seat; Ipod dangling from her ear, head rested back on her chair, face turned towards the window, and a forehead slightly touching the window. Her breath made a small circular mist on the window. She was a very beautiful kid, the type chicks spot in a supermarket and screech, “aww, she is soooooo sweet.” My god, how I can’t stand that kind of drama!

But this kid was a flower. The type of kid any man

would look at and have a paternal thing stir in him. She looked delicate, brittle even. And she sat there in that picturesque like way, as if waiting for a painter to capture her poise. To freeze this unconscious character.

Her eyes were closed.

For a moment I thought she was catching a quick snooze. But on closer inspection I could tell she wasn’t. Her face was a poster of inertia. Her eyelids only flattered ever so slightly. Her lips shimmered faintly, as if she was silently reciting a holy verse. She was immersed in the moment and by extension within herself. She seemed engaged in some form of internal conversation. She seemed divorced from life. She sat there, eyes defiantly shut; as if afraid that if she opened them the world would intrude into this perfectly intimate world she had created, this world that the music she was streaming from her Ipod had helped her create…her own private world; pure and unadulterated. She had convincingly detached herself from reality and in effect gotten lost in its translation.

That song – whatever she was listening to – had stolen that little girl’s soul.

I wondered what she was listening to. I really did give it a long think. I wondered what small girls listen to. Was it Taylor Swift? Justin Bieber? Or perhaps Jonas Brothers? I wondered what that song made her feel? Did it make her sad? Did it make her think of her best friend? Did it make her ponder over life and over her life in general? Was her very young mind matured enough to really mull over life, to place it on a board and cut through it open with scalpels with the hope of finding answers within? Her innocence was intoxicating. Just looking at her sent a fuzzy feeling in me, it made me think, albeit fleetingly, of my daughter. Forget it, Making Appearances, you wouldn’t understand this feeling.

Anyway as I sat in that stagnant traffic looking up at this little girl, I felt a sense of loss. A sense

of hopelessness. Hopelessness and envy. Envy because that kid had escaped – if not momentarily, – from herself. She had walked away from homework, and school bullies, and cartoon network and math and traffic. I felt hopeless because I was feeling envious of her new (or old) found seclusion. That little girl momentarily brought into my life a sense of perspective, but she also filled me with such inexplicable sorrow, such garroting melancholy. She brought home a realization of how trapped we all are in our lives.

We don’t really escape fully even when we are sleep (or high) do we? We are always aware…aware of our mortality. We are always aware of the smells of the night, and the sound of our hearts, even though what we crave for at times is to momentarily stop loving, stop working, stop dreaming, stop thinking, stop breathing… and escape to a place where we can’t feel ourselves. A place where we are comfortable not being human. Home of the departed.

Traffic started crawling, lane started moving. I remember feeling giddy with anticipation, feeling anxious. Panic maybe. I was almost sure that the sudden jerking of the bus as it started forward would make the kid open her eyes. You want to hear something really morbid? I ached to look into that little girl’s eyes. To peek into her soul and see if in there lived something inexplicably unworldly, something immortally jarring. An elixir of life. Something I wasn’t privy of. Anything! I knew I was being ridiculous, but it consumed it. Even though my lane was clearly moving I was reluctant to move and the moron behind me started leaning on his horn because he was in a big bloody rush to the next jam. I punched my hazard button and waited for the bus to start moving because then the kid would surely open her eyes, and when she did the first thing she would see was me and I’m confident that later that evening she would tell her mom of the creepy guy in traffic.

The bus finally started inching forward, chugging along and I crawled adjacent to it my eyes never leaving the little girl’s face. I stared at her intensely willing her to open those eyes, convinced that I would see something in her. That I would see the song in that little girl’s eyes.

But she never opened her eyes.

The little girl never did open her eyes even when the bus chocked and jerked along and a sense of loss struck me. I remember feeling sad and sorry for myself for being so trivial and hopeful and yes, for being insane and dysfunctional. But at that moment of insanity I was certain that if I looked in that kid’s eyes I was going to stumble on a startling revelation. Something of cosmic proportions. I was going to see, in her eyes, a product of a song.