Music. Some music grabs you. You listen to it over and over until you fix each line and each lyric in your memory. It's a compulsion. The song rolls around in your head like a broken record demanding to be understood, to be memorized to be given life by you. Greedy music, selfish music it competes for attention at the expense of other songs. Finding such a track is exciting. A new compulsion to occupy your thoughts. Quickly through repeated listenings you learn the outline of a song. Enough to lessen the urgency of your addiction. Your brain focuses in on specifics. Lazily noticing the odd phrase that it had bypassed. Taking pleasure from small victories. Eventually as is inevitable there comes a time when there are no more surprises. The song rolls on, a comfortable, well loved, well understood tune. A long the way it loses something. The mystery and the excitement of the first hearing are no longer there. You start to listen to other music and forget about that much loved extraordinary song. Love. Sometimes you fall in love. I first fell in a small room with bricks that were painted blue. It happened sometime in that first week of meeting. Lying on the bed listening to the Trash Can Sinatras album "A Happy Pocket". That was our album. He had bought a few days before we met. We would spend hours in that room. The light would fade from mid afternoon to early evening. The small cassette player would temperamentally sing out our songs. Occasionally stopping in its paint splattered tracks to chew up a cassette or two. We lay next to each other talking and reading and just being together. Together on the single bed with music and the biro on the wall where he had anxiously written something for fear he might forget it by the time he found paper. We moved to rooms with more space and double beds and wall paper. We moved further apart. The urge to be in each others company subsided somewhat. But we still loved each other. We still found the odd surprise that would remind us why we were in love in the first place. That look on his face when he gave me that ring. That impulsive hug he gave while we were walking down the street. We knew each other well. We could read each other like an open book. I knew if he was lying to me. He knew when I was too tired or worried to talk reasonably. But somewhere along the line, a line that now nearly stretched 4 years, we stopped wanting to understand. We stopped wanting to remember the reason we were in love. We fell out of love. An unhappy end to the story. Don't let love slip away. Old songs can be re-found and re-loved. Old love can never be reclaimed. Take Care, Rachel _________________________________________________________________ Send and receive Hotmail on your mobile device: http://mobile.msn.com +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to majordomo@missprint.org. WWW: http://www.missprint.org/sinister +-+ "sinsietr is a bit freaky" - stuart david, looper +-+ +-+ "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" "peculiarly deranged fanbase" +-+ +-+ "pasty-faced vegan geeks... and we LOST!" - NME April 2000 +-+ +-+ "frighteningly named Sinister List organisation" - NME May 2000 +-+ +-+ "sick posse of f**ked in the head psycho-fans" - NME June 2001 +-+ +-+ Nee, nee mun pish, chan pai dee kwa +-+ +-+ Snipp snapp snut, sa var sagan slut! +-+ +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+