“When I was a kid there was this song I fucking hated, but I think I’ve been saving it for you.”
“Wow. That is both the most and least romantic statement I’ve heard in a long time.”
“Ok, yeah, that wasn’t the best way of putting it. When I was a kid we had school plays, or not really plays, more just a series of songs with a thin narrative thread that connected them. I was cast as the male lead. As my luck would have it, my teachers cast a girl I fucking hated. I didn’t really have a reason to hate her, and I don’t think anyone knew I hated her. In retrospect I have no idea why I did, something just rubbed me the wrong way about her. I’m sure my depth of personal reflection was rather shallow at the time, so I’m sure it was something like she took my eraser and didn’t return it and I saw it as a crime in the league of treason or regicide.”
“You didn’t know what regicide was when you were a kid.”
“Weirdly enough I did. I was both a huge dork and there was a simpsons joke that involved it. That’s not important though. In the play I had to hold this girl’s hand and I really didn’t want to do it. Midwesterners we’re really handsy people to start with and again, fucking hated this girl. The idea of the whole school and parents and whatnot looking at me doing this was too much. I was seriously pissed that I was put in this situation. “
“The stresses of kids in the developed world.”
“I know, right? I know it’s silly, but I swear I’m going somewhere with this. So one day I was waiting to practice this bullshit and I was sitting in the Church that is attached to my grade school, it was really pretty actually, the lights were off but sunlight was hitting the stained glass windows in a really cool way. The windows were oddly abstract for a decidedly straitlaced group of parishioners and I always thought they were cool. Getting lost in their trippy kaleidoscope is probably a pretty telling foreshadowing of the huge stoner I’d become like six years later. But I was sitting there, alone, or atleast sitting by myself and I was ruminating on how much bullshit the situation was. I think the part that pissed me off is that no one asked me if I wanted to do it. I could have politely declined, which I would have done, and it wouldn’t have been a big deal. Everyone just thrust this shit one me and I was expected to sing and dance on command. I think this is one of the first times I remember really feeling like an independent person- one who was capable of making decisions for myself and wanting, really wanting, those decisions to be respected.”
“That song was popular at the time though and it was stuck in my head through the whole situation. I guess I could probably figure out exactly when this story took place by looking when it was popular. Whatever year it was the song was huge and because of my mental association between this situation and that song I, consequently, hated the song. I think I was vocal of my hatred of the song, and consequently my siblings blasted it every time it came on the radio or MTV, which we watched religiously after school before my parents got home and made us turn it off.”
“Oddly enough sitting in that pew, in the colorful light of the window, song playing on repeat in my stressed mind, I realized the lyrics were actually really sweet. They were a loving, even poignant description of someone in love. Now jaded old me sees it as a picture of love that is roughly on the level of an elementary school student’s understanding of love, that’s probably why I liked it.”
“In my anger that day I decided I’d hate the song up until I met someone who made me feel the feelings the singer described in the song. And, well, I seem to have met you, and well, I guess I feel the adult version of what the singer is describing.”
“Wow, that is weird. I guess it’s complementary. And well if you get nothing out of our relationship, at least you can say I help you stop hating some random ‘90’s song you haven’t heard nor thought about in 20 years. I guess that’s something.”
“Better than what most couples get out of each other.”
