The Stars are making me nostalgic

It started in a little Italian deli around the corner on Hudson. I had just paid for my sun dried tomato, mozarella and olive spread sandwich when the guy ringing me popped in his iPod and started up the Stars "Your Ex-Lover is Dead." The opening strains of that sad and beautiful song made my throat catch. I stopped fiddling with my wallet and took a look at him, a real look at him--no one loves that song unless their heart has been broken--"I love this song," I said, almost as an afterthought to the look, because he was looking back at me. In that one palpable moment we shared this tremendous, cosmic, mind-blowing sorrow. My heart danced. In the next second he went on to the next customer and I folded up my wallet. Gone like that. Re-lived when I came home and put in the Stars' latest, Heart.

For me that album is indelibly etched with India, so I'm reminded of Nick. The Nick who oddly felt the need to break up with me gently via email, a month after I had left the country, a month after he mysteriously never showed up in Colaba for one last rendezvous, as if, well, what exactly was he thinking? That somehow my leaving was a ruse for a deep seated need to make him mine? Part of the grace that's entered my life enabled me to write and wish him all the best, to have everything beautiful, when what I really wanted was to point out, uh, you can't fire me, I already quit. Except maybe I didn't.

Nick and I probably have very little in common, I can't say for sure because I hardly know him. But God, he made me laugh. Something about him made me want to come out and play. I loved the spirit. So why'd he have to go and fire me?

In my writing class an older woman is writing a memoir about her disastous marriage. The chapter we read the other day detailed an illicit affair that took place in Paris and Germany. I'm pretty sure she would have been living in the U.S. at the time. How did this woman groom an extramarital liaison across continents when I can't even seem to score an in-town, no-brainer hookup? And just now, on the phone with Karen, when she told me about a guy she dated who getting back with his ex-girlfriend. How in the hell does that even happen? More to the point, what is so hideously wrong with me that I couldn't even get my ex-husband to return email? (I gave up trying a good six months ago.) That I was un-hired from a relationship that never was?

And then the music brings me back: You're cold, maybe you just missed the sun. You fall, feeling like it's just begun. So far, keeping it together's been enough. Look up. Rain is falling looks like love...your girl, she's a renegade. A hurricane that keeps you there. Safe.

I remember that something enjoyed once can be savored again and again, so long as I stay in the enjoyment. The beautiful moment. I need not give wings to thoughts that try to steal it, or buy into the drama of the stories I like to tell myself around it, the crashing, the burning. I remember to wrap up in the safety of my renegade shelter.