For the last several days I’ve been lost in my past, not in the profoundly uncomfortable way that I’m used to, but more like I imagine the end of my life will be like; my days filled with movies of my life. Every song I rediscover has a memory attached. Every old picture I come across takes me into parts of my mind I’d long since dismissed. I partially blame facebook.

I told my husband yesterday that I feel like jumping out of my skin, and so I’ve been experimenting much like when I was a teenager, with different tactics designed to remove me from my head, to (I’m sorry, in-laws..) keep me alive another day or two or seven, just until the overwhelming urge to NOT BE HERE would go away.

As was the case 20 years ago, I am bad at this task. I continue to wish myself lost, to wish for escape, to ache for an easy way out. And I continue to succumb to the pull of reality; jobs to do, laundry to fold, kids to raise.

and so instead of a newly acquired drug habit or shopping addiction, I’ve just retreated backward.

An upside to this mental wandering through the ages has been my newly rekindled infatuation with my husband and his music and his mind and really everything about him. It’s easy to forget, as we trudge through the day to day of chores and jobs and broken cars and endless sock wars and diapers full of shit, that our meeting and courtship was truly magical. Everything about how we came to be is right out of a modern day romantic comedrama, and for the past few days I’ve been reliving it all through music and through relentless Q&A sessions with him about politics. Tonight I found a song (god, Itunes how I love and hate you) that was on one of the first (of many) mix tapes he sent me while we fell in love on separate coasts. I would rewind this one song and play it repeatedly while in the car, in my walkman at the gym, walking around downtown. It haunted me, and made me ache to see Michael again. This song, it was perfect. There were other perfect songs (skin storm, one of several he included that actually made me blush and wonder if his whole shy guy thing wasn’t just an elaborate ruse, is one of them) We’ve been trying to remember the name of this song by Gene for almost SEVEN YEARS and tonight it took me 2 minutes to figure it out, playing sample after sample until finally there it was. All these years we’ve theorized, and wondered, and made plans to figure it out but until tonight I for some reason wasn’t ready to make the effort.

Which is kind of how I fell in love with him. Sample after sample, year after year, and then when he finally appeared in front of me the notes were perfect- familiar even, and there was no doubt. All I had to do was be ready.