Day 3: Talk about a memory triggered by a particular song.

In the summer of 1997, my marriage was on the rocks.  I had two small children and an empty relationship; no, actually, a non-existent relationship with my husband.  When he admitted that he didn’t love me; maybe never had; and that after the birth of our children he had stopped caring about me at all – well, I started thinking about leaving.  I also started thinking about the man I fell in love with when I was 17; the man who broke my heart over and over again.   The man who, despite me cutting all ties ten years previously, I still carried in my fractured heart.  I wondered if he was still married.  After a few months of torturing myself with the question, I sent one of my business cards to him at his place of employment.  A few weeks went by with no reply.

One day upon arriving at work, I found a message on my voice mail.  I knew his voice immediately.  We met for lunch.  He was still married although his wife and kids were living in Arizona.  We both expressed our strong intent to not get romantically involved with each other again.  My heart was singing after that lunch; I couldn’t tell if the flame still burned in him but it felt good to talk to my best friend again.

At that time, I was swimming on my lunch breaks at a pool close to work.  He started showing up and working out with me.  We would swim and talk and then go our separate ways.  One day, he pressed a cassette tape into my hand as we were leaving and asked me to listen to the song on my way back to the office.

He called me from a phone booth a few hours later and said “I love you still.”  He offered to disappear from my life again if that was what I wanted.  No.

He is now my husband.  He is still my best friend.  And I still crank that song whenever it comes on the radio or my iPod.