Eve & Bob: Date #7 b
By Eve Sturges
Excuse My Cynicism
Well, it finally happened.
Wait, let me listen to it again.
(3:45 minutes later) Yes. It’s me. Undeniably.
On my long list of dreams, squished somewhere between becoming a firefighter and kissing James McAvoy, sits some sort of misty fantasy about a hot boy writing songs about me.
Bob is that hot boy. (Surfing 365/year at 5 am does a body good.) Bob is funny (dry humor that makes me hurt inside.) Bob writes excellent songs that he sings with a gravelly voice, and plays on his guitar. He is sort of the quiet type, but fills the silence with his music, often picking up and playing in sort of random intervals throughout the day and night.
Except it’s not a love song.
Bob and I have an agreement not to love one another because he is moving away, and I “don’t want something serious anyhow.” Except, we had more fun together than we expected to, and learned more from each other than we planned. His song is truthful about these things, and…yet…it is still a song. About me.
I am not sure how to feel. My life isn’t any different than it was before the song was written. I still have dirty dishes in the sink. I still don’t have enough money. Lily’s bedroom light bulb needs changing, and I am still not tall enough, even with a chair. And—most importantly—our relationship is no different. This Bob still doesn’t love me, and very soon he is still moving away. The song doesn’t really signify anything; Bob put some of our experiences into poetic meter, and it goes nicely with his guitar.
I had a photographer-Bob tell me that I was his inspiration, that I made him so happy he realized he could do anything, and pursue his art, that it was me that helped him pick up where his ex-girlfriend had left him, broken, scared and alone. He freaked out one week later, stopped calling me altogether, missing my birthday. I had another Bob tell me he was sure that I was The One, that we were perfect together, that he never met anyone like me before in his life, and that was all on the first date. He ended things four days later, deciding that he was only 29, and not ready to settle down. His music career was just
about to blow up, you see, and he’d be touring any minute now. (His words, not mine. And for the record, his songs have yet to grace the air waves, 2 years later)
Can I hold on to the first moment I heard the song, instead of being absorbed by the cynicism that swelled up in the moments after? Beyond one second, I meant something to someone who may or may not be serious about me at all. And as he sings it over and over for crowds, it will lose its meaning, because he’s not thinking about it all, he’s just got it memorized. And the line about me is going to get him laid by everyone else, so that puts me….where?
I don’t know what it’s like for girls about which love songs are written, but I imagine the experience isn’t much different. I don’t mean the kind of songs that cheesy men sing for their wives at weddings, or write on their Casios and play privately just for the two of them during some sort of embarrassing love-making ritual. I mean the songs that are written by singer song writers and then sung about in front of audiences all over the place on stages and around camp fires and at open mikes and recorded on Myspace pages in the acoustic/folk/punk/electronic categories. Being a part of that kind of music is so much less important feeling than I had always imagined it would be.
Bob will sing this song over and over, and they’re just words that go nicely with his guitar, and he has them memorized so they’re no longer words, just sounds. And no matter what these sounds might mean to either of us, Bob will still move away. I will end things with him before his departure date because I’ve reached a point where resisting love is too hard. It becomes harder to resist the feeling into which I’m so tempted to collapse. Singing the song does not rescind our arrangement. He moves away, I don’t love him, nobody gets hurt. The song isn’t about loving me.