Whenever I’ve had a classically disastrous breakup, I tune into a part of my playlist that is not on a regular rotation. You know the ones. The Breakup Songs. They are the songs that let you move through the pain and past the hurt, songs that speak to you and soothe you.
I have such a playlist. I even have a sub list of songs for specific failed relationships. No, I’m not going to share the hit list with you. Suffice it to say that these songs are really amazing in their own right, and have served me well during the various times that my heart has been broken.
These lists must be popular with others, too. Google “Best Breakup Songs” and the search engine returns more than 45 million hits.
If you listen to these songs long enough, you start to notice a recurring theme, the one where you wonder what you’d say to an ex if you ran into them unexpectedly. The most well known of these is probably Dan Fogelberg’s “Same Old Lang Syne,” about meeting an old lover in the grocery store. There’s also Collin Raye’s “Someone You Used to Know,” which I got confused with the song “Somebody That I Used to Know,” which I only found out about recently from a friend who had her own list of break up songs. (If you haven’t seen this video, check it out. Five people playing one guitar).
The title alone really says it all. We put so much into these relationships, sharing our deepest secrets, dreams, hopes and feelings. We literally bare our soul to this other person, letting them into our inner world where there are no walls and no defenses.
Then something goes horribly wrong. It may have been nothing that either of you did. It could have simply fell apart on its own, an uncomfortable process that neither of you saw coming, outside of the times when an awkward silence becomes a substitute for something that really should have been said, something that could have either kept you together longer, perhaps forever, or hastened an inevitable departure or an uncomfortable goodbye.
If you want a really great breakup song along those lines, “Goodbye in Her Eyes” by the Zac Brown Band is the bomb, especially the lines:
She didn’t have to say a word
It was just so plain to see
She had found what she’d been looking for
And I knew it wasn’t me
But back to the what would you say if you saw your once significant other again genre. Imagine meeting the other person. Would you have something pithy to say? Something profound? Or would you grasp for something, anything, to say.
I actually had this happen to me just recently. I hadn’t seen my ex for eight years. It wasn’t an intentional avoidance, she simply lived in Virginia, not Washington. She came to pick up my son while she was in town. I welcomed her into my home and then that awkward moment arrived.
I searched frantically for something to say, something to this woman who had shared my life for the better part of 10 years as well as a working relationship in the company we ran together. What brilliant thing did I manage to come up with?
“Did you get taller?”
Yes, that’s it. I am not making this up. This is all that came to mind. It was as dumb as saying, “So your eyes are still brown, huh?” Maybe dumber, since people in their 40s aren’t exactly known for having growth spurts.
What was even odder is that all those years together have become a gray spot in my head. I don’t really remember any specifics from this period of time. Where once there were vivid memories, only shadows remain.
I think I only have the shadows still because we’re still connected through my teenage son and dealing with raising him.
I don’t have any such shadows with my “unfortunate series of interactions” in Florida, my time with Michelle. We don’t talk anymore, even though I once famously declared that I “couldn’t imagine a time when I wasn’t friends with her.” Well, I guess I didn’t have a very good imagination at the time because we haven’t spoken in four years.
Today, she is simply someone I used to know, bordering between that and someone I never really knew at all. I can see photos of her on the Internet and nothing registers anymore.
It’s funny that these someones we used to love can so easily become nothings in our life over time. Someone we would have at one time given our life for becomes someone we wouldn’t even give the time of day to. Where we once couldn’t stop talking, we suddenly find ourselves struggling to string even two sentences together when we cross paths.
Our once Technicolor life together has been reduced to various shades of gray, shadows punctuated by a few ill conceived, banal lines about the weather or the traffic as we look for the nearest exit should our paths cross.
You’d be well within your rights to wonder how it all came to pass. All the water under that bridge which eventually burned, leaving you each on other side of the respective river of time with no way and no desire to find a way back.
All that is left are a few memories and the songs that remember when. Those fabulous breakup songs that hug you tightly so that you can eventually let go and move on, realizing that what you thought were the best days of your life were never in that past, but are out there somewhere in the future. Those days aren’t and perhaps never were with that someone you used to know, but instead, someone you have yet to meet.
It’s one of the amazing things that makes life so worth living. With every loss there is a chance for a new discovery, a new beginning with someone you’re just getting to to know, someone that with any luck will become one you want to get to know for the rest of your life, in all its Technicolor splendor and endless wonder.
In the Emerald City, enjoying a colorful life these days and blessing this broken road,
– Robb