Six Sad Songs on a Saturday

This post came about rather accidentally ... I was going through my CDs last night to upload some music to the computer so that I could put it on my iPod for my train ride down to Florida this coming Friday when I came across a CD that I had burned quite a few years ago with the simple title on the case of "Angst". Ut-oh ... I had totally forgotten about that CD but as soon as it was in my hand I immediately remembered why I'd made it and obviously it wasn't because I was at a high spot in my life.

Those of you who have been with me on this blog for some time are probably quite aware that I walk around with a hole in my heart and have been doing so for years. I don't think about the guy who put it there too much these days (oh thank goodness!) but he's someone I still love and always will. He can't be with me and I can't be with him but for awhile there we were together and it was that sort of heart-in-your-mouth, forget-to-breathe kind of love that has probably inspired more sad songs than anything else when it goes wrong.

Anyhow, long story short it did go wrong and not being a songwriter or musician myself I turned to the help of those who could in one of the saddest genres of music out there - country.  The CD in question has 18 songs that put into words what my heart was feeling and I'm sure I listened to it endlessly until I finally sucked it up, pulled myself together, and put the music of my life away where I completely forgot about it until last night when I pulled it out and decided to see just how angsty I was at the time.

Wow, I'm surprised I was upright and functioning and not taking copious amounts of anti-depressants at the time! However, I can assure you that I wasn't and that today I can listen to these songs with merely a twinge of sadness and regret for what might have been but never was rather than climbing back into a large pit of darkness and despair and pulling the covers back over my head.

Life goes on, hearts sort of heal, and even though you never really forget that you have a hole in your heart, you get on with life. Of course with that said, the song at the bottom of this pile still applies from time to time though thankfully those times are further and further apart. I no longer need to burn CDs labeled "Angst" to sum up my life and can now just enjoy the music for what it is - good music by good artists who got me through a tough patch in my life.

Five on Friday - The Broken-Hearted Version

It would have been very easy for me to turn this week's Five on Friday meme into a Fifteen on Friday meme as there are probably more songs out there about love lost and unrequited than there are songs about love found and cherished but I didn't want to depress the heck out of everyone so I kept it to just five plus an extra three.  

Even though it's been said that misery loves company and I was depressed enough earlier this week to give thought to a broken-hearted version of Travis' weekly musical meme, I didn't really want to drag everyone else down with me. However, rather than just ignore the fact that the scar had fallen off an old wound and opened up the the hole in my heart that has been there for many years and I cried myself to sleep one night while clutching a teddy bear that maybe I should have gotten rid of 25 years ago as he's a reminder of someone I still love, I decided that it might be just a little more cathartic to just throw it out here on the old blog for all and sundry to see rather than just keep it to myself.  Ok, so I guess misery really does love company after all!

I rather suspect that my old and dear friend Cyndi from California would be disappointed in the chink I found in my armor the other night but then again, I think maybe she'd also understand that even though it's been eight years since a very heavy door was closed once and forevermore on any communication between myself and the guy who still holds a very special place in my heart that every once in awhile the heartbreak is going to come back to remind me that I still miss someone.

Trust me, I don't dwell on it and I very rarely even think of  the man anymore but for some reason I've recently had a few dreams that have haunted me a little bit and brought back the very painful realization that I am never ever going to see him again or hear his voice again or anything else and there's not a damned thing I can do about it but to accept the reality of the situation, re-patch that hole with perhaps something a little stronger, suck it up, and move on. To paraphrase Sting's song "A Thousand Years", I will always have the haunted memory of his face but I guess if I only fall apart once every eight years or so then I'm not doing all that badly, right?

I promise a happier version of Travis' Five on Friday meme next week but until then "I can still feel the breeze that rustles through the trees, the misty memories of days gone by" ... "and I think I'm gonna miss you for a long, long time."

Take This Tune - The Heartbreak Version

This week over at Jamie's meme Take This Tune, contributing author Fairweather from Fairweather's Red Mud Inn asked us to rip open our chests and pull out our favorite heartbreak song. As I tend to relate music to events in my life - including having had my heart grape-stomped on a few too many times - there is a veritable treasure trove of heartbreak songs from which to choose including ones from various and assorted artists like The BeeGees, Meat Loaf, Nickelback, Reba McEntire, and too many others to name. However, in an attempt to keep this post short, I'm only going to pick one song - for now!

Hit the play button and listen while I try to explain what it is about this song that pulls rather strongly at my heartstrings.


"One Believer" is from country singer Steve Wariner's 1993 album "Drive" and - like so many of Steve's songs - it drives your way right into your heart and parks there while blaring the stereo over and over until you know the lyrics almost as well as you know your name.  The man, in addition to having a golden voice, is one of the finest guitar players in the world and is one of only four people who have been given the "Certified Guitar Player" (CGP) award by Chet Atkins. No mean feat! 

Steve has released 18 studio albums - most of which reside in my CD collection - and has charted more than fifty singles on the Billboard country singles charts including ten Number One hits. Even though I like the Number Ones, some of my favorite stuff by Steve are songs like "One Believer" as the guy really knows how to sing about love lost, heartbreak, despair, and the difficulty in moving on after having once found love and then lost it. There are times when I swear that he wrote songs like "There For Awhile", "When Will I Let Go", and "Some Fools Never Learn" just for me.

As for this song, just read the lyrics and you can see wherein the heartbreak lies:


- Steve Wariner Lyrics
And as for me, I'm still one believer ... I just try not to think about that very much these days. That doesn't mean I've forgotten. I haven't.

A Book and A Brain

Whilst making my blog rounds today I happened upon a quick little link called The Book Quiz at Blue Pyramid over on Maddy's Alien in a Foreign Field blog so, of course, I just had to check it out! With only six questions to answer and over sixty-four possibilities as outcomess it sounded pretty good to me. Besides, you know how curiosity tends to kill the cat on a fairly regular basis!

So, six quick and easy questions later this is what I got ...



You're Love in the Time of Cholera!
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Like Odysseus in a work of Homer, you demonstrate undying loyalty by sleeping with as many people as you possibly can. But in your heart you never give consent! This creates a strange quandary of what love really means to you. On the one hand, you've loved the same person your whole life, but on the other, your actions barely speak to this fact. Whatever you do, stick to bottled water. The other stuff could get you killed.
Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.
O ... K ... With sixty-four possible outcomes that's what I got?? You're kidding, right? Is it because I said "no" when asked if I liked Oprah? The only reason I have ever even heard of this book is because it's the book that Sara (Kate Beckinsale) writes her name and phone number in before disappearing on Jonathan (John Cusack) in Serendipity, a 2001 romantic comedy that I just happened to watch on TBS this past Saturday. Now tell me watching that movie recently and then getting that very book in this quiz is not serendipitous! Hmm, perhaps strange things are afoot at the Circle K?

If you're not familiar with the whole concept of serendipity, it's the phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for - in other words, a happy and unexpected turn of fate or fortune. Which is sort of what the whole movie Serendipity is about. To be honest I didn't particularly like it the first time I saw it but it had John Cusack in it and I love me some John Cusack so I watched it. I wanted to reach through the screen, grab Sara and throttle her at times because you don't just have a fantastic night with a guy like John Cusack (oh, okay, his character Jonathan) and then just take off in the hopes that fate will bring you back together. Good God, woman, what were you thinking?? But at the same time, I am a firm believer in fate so after giving it some thought and a second viewing, I decided I did like it after all. Sort of. Almost. Kind of. I definitely liked John Cusack!

I've also sort of kind of had John on the brain this week as I had watched another John Cusack movie with Amanda this past Friday night. She insisted I watch 1408, a scary movie which is based on a Stephen King short story, and then she has the nerve to tease me about liking John Cusack! Funny how she can go all ga-ga over her various rock stars and yet if I like a movie star or two I get razzed about it. Doesn't seem quite fair, does it?

Speaking of having things on the brain (nice segue, eh?), I am honored to have received the following award from Lee at Tar Heel Ramblings today -


To quote from Lee -

"Linda ... has written an excellent post that got me thinking, and for that, I would like to award her the Brain Building Blog award.
This post, which was in response to a challenge from Morgen’s Manic Monday to blog on the word heart, evolved into an essay on what love does to the heart…especially when that love fades and the heart is broken.
I have experienced the phenomena of a broken heart, both as the one doing the breaking, and as the one who’s heart has broken. To be honest, it isn’t a pleasant experience to be in either role.
Linda has shared from her life and experience, putting the wounds of broken relationships on display for all to see. In doing so, she helps all of us examine our relationships with an awareness that our own feelings and thoughts are only part of the equation.
Thank you, Linda, for sharing your heart with us. With reflection, perhaps our relationships can be healthier and happier, and the pain of a breaking heart can be avoided.

Well, shucks and golly - thank you so very much, Lee! I'm so glad to have written something that spoke to another and got that person to thinking. Broken hearts, I feel, are something that a lot of us have experienced and join us together as human beings. Whether you're the breaker or the breakee, it's never a pleasant experience but it is one that you can learn and grow from. What you do with a broken heart can define the remainder of your life in that it can scare you off of love completely or it can show you that you're stronger than you think and perhaps make you a better person. Or perhaps not.

In my case I would like to set the record straight on one thing that maybe I wasn't clear on in writing yesterday's post ... even though I still wish that things had turned out differently with the guy who grape-stomped on my heart three times - which I alone allowed him to do - I am not pining over him. My heart healed years ago and no longer sports a gaping, open wound that pains me with every single beat. Sure, there are things that will stop me in my tracks every once in awhile - a bit of a song, a phrase in a movie, a hint of a scent, a piece of a dream, a line in a book - but the debilitating gut-wrenching, drop-to-my-knees pain is simply another part of my life's history.

As Simon & Garfunkel once sang ... "If I never loved, I never would have cried." And as My Chemical Romance also sang, "I'm okay, I'm okay, I'm okay now." Trust me.

Manic Monday - Heart

Morgen's Manic Monday this week gave us the word heart so let's see where mine takes us, shall we?

"Love is a many splendord thing, Love lifts us up where we belong, All you need is Love."
- Christian to Satine in Moulin Rouge

Way back in the dark ages, when I was a kid, I used to think that a person couldn't really have a broken heart because your heart wasn't what you loved someone with - you loved someone with your head. I was a firm believer in all emotions originating and residing in a person's brain and not any other part of one's body and that's all there was to it. For someone who had never had their heart broken, it made perfect sense.

"Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love."
- Charlie Brown

In my teenage years I went through your standard angsty heartbreak episodes a couple of times but even though I thought that every song that told of a broken heart was written just for me and I was going to die several times over, I obviously survived to fall in love another day.

"Sadness flies on the wings of the morning and out of the heart of darkness comes the light."
- Jean Giraudoux

When my first marriage broke up, I got to experience firsthand the first inkling of a real honest-to-goodness broken heart as I was quite devastated when my husband told me that "there were too many single women out there" for him to be a husband and father. Ouch. Still, I had gotten married at the ridiculously young age of 19 and when he left myself and our 6-month old son to go out in search of a good number of those single women I was only 23 and still had the resilience of youth. It took awhile to get over the rejection and hurt but I managed to and became a better person for the experience - or at least so I'd like to think!

"The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return."
- Christian, Moulin Rouge

A few other relationships came and went before I met "the one" - the guy I could have happily spent the entirety of my life with, the guy who was my other half, the guy who finished my sentences or me his, the Yin to my Yang, the one person who completed me. People talk of soul mates and I'm sure that for me, he was/is.

"You complete me."
- Jerry to Dorothy in Jerry Maguire

When I fell in love with him it was with more than just my brain - it was with every single fiber of my being, every single nerve ending in my body, every single bit of my mind, my soul, and my heart. There was not a single part of me that this man did not touch and I finally understood what all of the brouhaha was about when it came to love and going to the ends of the earth and back or giving everything you had for that one special person. It was the most intense feeling I've ever felt second only to the even more intense feeling when the heart that I had given to this man was handed back to me in tiny little pieces.

"I don't know why they call it heartbreak. It feels like every other part of my body is broken too."
- Missy Altijd

My love for this man had taken me from the highest of highs to the lowest of lows and the pain was incredible. The pain touched every single fiber of my being, every single nerve ending in my body, every single bit of my mind, my soul, and my heart. While my mind cried out in anguish, my chest hurt from the very real pain of what I knew was my heart breaking as I can still remember standing there with my hand pressed to my chest while it hurt - it physically hurt.

"Now I know I have a heart, because it's breaking."
- The Tin Woodsman, The Wizard of Oz

My heart didn't just crack as it had in the past, it broke wide open and I wasn't sure if I was ever going to be able to put it back together again much like all the King's horsemen and all the King's men must have felt when looking at Humpty Dumpty smashed in pieces all over the ground. I was a devastated mess but eventually I was able to pull myself back together and go on with my life. Until I gave my patched-together heart back to the same man - two more times.

"If a man should importune me to give a reason why I loved him, I find it could no otherwise be expressed, than by making answer: because it was he, because it was I."
- Michel de Montaigne

The second time was less than a year after the first - the third time was 16 years after that. Time may, in fact, heal all wounds but when you allow the scar to be ripped open again even 17 years later it hurts just as bad, if not worse, than the first time. Each time it happened I can remember holding my hand to my chest and wondering how it was that the pain could be centered there instead of in my head when love was an emotion and not a tangible, physical thing that one could touch.

"They say that time heals all wounds but all it's done so far is give me more time to think about how much I miss you."
- Ezbeth Wilder

"But why?", you might ask. "Why put yourself through that kind of pain not once or twice but three times?" I've asked myself that very same question many times and what comes to mind is a line from the poem An Essay On Man written by Alexander Pope in 1733 where he writes, "Hope springs eternal in the human breast ..." combined with a simple statement once made by Woody Allen, "The heart wants what the heart wants."

"I would rather have had one breath of her hair, one kiss from her mouth, one touch of her hand, than eternity without it. One."
- Seth speaking of Maggie in City of Angels

Sad but true and I shamefully admit that I would put my heart through that particular wringer yet again if the opportunity ever presented itself in this lifetime. Now, before you call me every manner of fool consider this - Have you ever loved someone so much it made you cry? Have you ever loved someone so much you can't get him or her out of your head no matter the time passed or distance apart? Have you ever loved someone so much that your life feels incomplete without them?

"Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell."
- Edna St. Vincent Millay

We put ourselves through a lot of self-tortures during the course of our lives and love and heartbreak are probably two of the biggest but even with the pain, it is so worth it. Yes, I have been hurt badly but I have also felt the most incredible happiness ever by loving this one person and I'd like to think that the happiness still outweighs the sadness. God willing maybe someday the obstacles that keep us apart will no longer be there but even if that never happens I have the memories and I will never lose those.

" What the heart has once owned and had, it shall never lose."
- Henry Ward Beecher

If you're lucky enough to be with the love of your life - tell him or her so. If you aren't - why not? What's holding you back? Life is too short. Don't waste it.

"You never lose by loving. You always lose by holding back."
- Barbara DeAngelis

"Though you're someone in this world that I'll always choose to love, from now on you're only someone that I used to love." ~ Natalie Cole

Prior to April of 2000, when I moved into my current humble abode, I had done a lot of moving around. Sometimes I think it was because I had grown up in a military family that moved just about every two years and the idea of staying in one place for too long was foreign to me and sometimes I think it was just because I would get restless. Whatever the case may be, I will have been residing in the same place for a record seven years come April. Amazing. But not what I intended to write about today!

I guess the above just prefaces what I am going to write about which is that a lot of people have come and gone through my life over the years in one form or another - sometimes by my constant moving and sometimes not. To be honest there were some people that didn't upset me horribly to see go but more often there were others that I not only hated to see become a part of my past but truly hoped that they never would be.

However, life is a constantly changing process and change does bring about loss in many forms. It's ironic, though, that sometimes there are people in our lives who are as close to us as humanly possible, that we think will never not be an active part of our lives, that turn out to be nothing more than cherished memories and maybe even the occasional awkward silence when we run into them again.

I had such a run-in the other day while waiting at my doctor's office for my now bi-weekly iron infusion (yes, folks, my hemoglobin levels are slowly creeping towards normal!) I got to my appointment with plenty of time to spare with Amanda in tow as she had a Christmas gift card burning a hole in her pocket and we intended to go to Waterford afterwards so that she could make use of it but, as seems to often be the case with that particular office, I ended up sitting in the waiting room for awhile. Normally this particular waiting room is packed - very often it's standing room only - but on Tuesday afternoon it was just myself and Amanda and a lot of empty chairs.

While sitting there watching "Back to the Future II" and waiting to be called into the back to have a needle stuck in my arm, the door opened and in walked a guy I hadn't seen in over two years. He did a double-take in my direction and then stood there for a few seconds with his mouth opening and closing like the lobsters you see in the tanks at grocery stores when you're trying to pick out the best one to take home and throw in a pot of boiling water for dinner - looking for all the world like he wanted to say something but no words could come out. He eventually shut his mouth, turned, and went to the receptionist's desk without a backwards glance.

After my initial shock at seeing him, I managed to squeak out a very tiny "hi" - which I'm sure was at the subsonic hearing level only audible to dogs and dolphins! - and then I just sat there with what must have been the "oh wow, I just saw a ghost" look on my face. My astonished look was such that it caused Amanda to take off her earphones long enough to lean over to me and ask "what?" My answer? "Someone I used to work with". Lame, yes - but the best I could do given the circumstances.

Truth be told, the person standing and fidgeting at the reception desk less than ten feet away from where I was sitting, the guy who had done the marvelous lobster impression, was the last guy that I had given my heart to almost four years ago. He was one of those people that I had never wanted to become "nothing more than cherished memories and maybe even the occasional awkward silence when we run into them again" but he was. Big time.

Of all the doctor's offices in all the towns in all the world, he walks into mine ...

Well, okay, so I'm no Humphrey Bogart but neither was he any Lauren Bacall! However I'm sure you get the meaning! I haven't moved across the world and opened a cafe in Casablanca in order to escape my past, I've stayed right here in Norwich where chances are I'm occasionally going to run into my past - but who knew that running into said past could be so awkward that even the politeness of society is impossible? Obviously things didn't end well between us but you would think that after four years the man could have done more than stood there opening and closing his mouth like a lobster caught in a tank awaiting his boiled fate. Sigh ...

At any rate, the door had no sooner closed on his rapidly retreating figure when my nurse came out and summoned me into the back room. As one of those people who subscribes to the theory that "everything happens for a reason" I wondered what the reason behind that encounter might have been but, unlike I have been known to do in the past, I am not going to over analyze the situation. It was what it was.

Still - some good did come of this awkward encounter ... after he left I didn't feel like my heart had been ripped out of my chest, tossed on the floor, and stomped on like I felt the last time I ran into him at a grocery store two years ago and that's a good thing - a very good thing; I didn't feel like going home and having a good cry over woulda - coulda - shoulda's and that's a good thing - a very good thing; and I was able to laugh about it with my friends who were there four years ago and knew exactly the hell I had been through and that's not just a good thing - that's the best thing.

Amazing - time really does seem to heal all wounds ... go figure ... well, sort of ...