Here I am, celebrating another turn around the sun today, and the song challenge is “a song that makes you think of falling in love.”
At my birthday party many years ago, a joint event with two other women with birthdays that same week and an open invitation to a horde of friends and acquaintances, theirs, mine, and ours, I danced for the first time with a man I’d only recently met. He seemed like one of the good guys, but I was coming off one of the worst years of my life, with terrible losses in my family, a broken relationship, some friend betrayals, and the consequences of many, many bad choices and bad judgments on my part. The last thing I wanted or needed was a relationship with a man, no matter how nice he was. I needed to deal with my messy life and make hard decisions about what to do next.
Two years later, I’d marry that good guy, and a few months after that, we would move to Houston. We’ve had quite a life together–the good, the bad, and the ridiculous–and I can’t imagine celebrating all the birthdays since I met him with anyone else.
I think Fleetwood Mac’s “Crystal” is the first song Tom and I danced to at my birthday party that night. He may remember differently–that’s just part of having a few decades together. =)
ETA: Coming back after the fact because of the dreams I had last night–so vivid that after the dream began, I woke up briefly, went back to sleep immediately, and the same dream picked up where it left off. It was about a key person in my life story and evoked an array of memories and feelings. Mostly it reminded me that sometimes it’s good not to get what we think we want and that we–I–need to acknowledge, to myself, the better things about my nature instead of being hard on myself for my mistakes and flaws.