"I'm trying to learn understanding
Against the hell I can win
If you'd hold me up
Grow me up
Let me be a part of it
Give me the chance that I see
I could take me up
Raise me up
Get to know the heart of it
Give me your sweet soul dream..."
Sweet Soul Dream, World Party
This past Wednesday, I celebrated, alone, the fourteenth anniversary of the day I married Lauren.
Fourteen years ago on Wednesday, Lord, it seems like another lifetime ago, it seems like something that happened to someone else, in some other life I can only look at and smile at, but no, it really was me and it really was her, it really was me and and it really was my Lauren, we really and truly stood up in front of our friends and families and our world and we swore to love each other and to live together as one until we were, as we said in our vows, "parted by death."
This song, "Sweet Soul Dream", was our wedding song.
And we fulfilled those vows, completely and with honor, until, on November 20th of last year, after a mere thirteen years, three months, and twenty eight days of marriage, death parted us.
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I listen to this song tonight and I think back to the time when we first discovered its genius together, fifteen years ago this past April. We met during her time here in the US as a graduate student, in the humble surroundings of Albany, New York. We met, we became friends, we fell in love, and two days before she had to leave the country due to an expiring student visa, we admitted that love to each other.
And then she left and went back home.
Four and a half months later, she came back, to visit me for two weeks.
She was twenty four years old. I was twenty six. We were young and stupid and madly, madly in love.
She came over to visit me, for we wanted to see what we had; we spent that four and a half months apart living on daydreams and love letters and long distance phone calls, and we desperately wanted to spend some time together, to see if we had something eternal, because we suspected that we did, but there really is no substitute for living together in the same space, even if only for two short weeks, is there?
So she came over to visit me. And within a few days we knew, we knew, we knew.
I know it sounds crazy. I knew it sounded crazy then and even after having lived those thirteen-plus years of happy marriage together I know it probably sounds crazy now, but within a few days of her arrival here, we knew.
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I lived in a humble two bedroom flat on the corner of Lark and Chestnut Streets, 176 Chestnut Street, Apartment #4, with my best friend then and now, my boy Dan. I had the bedroom up front, the one out by the right front window. Lauren showed up and Dan went above and beyond to give us our space and to leave us alone, a gift from him that I will carry with me and cherish for as long as I live; he left us alone and we got ourselves down to the business, mostly in that bedroom, a long rectangular room with wood floors and wood shutters on the windows, a room with two closets and a small and rickety old bed and a desk and my Nana's old rocking chair that sat by those windows, next to my big old foot locker, we got ourselves down to the business of figuring out just what the hell we had.
And as I said, within a few days, we knew what we had: we knew we had what we both wanted more than anything else in the world, we knew we had each other and we knew had love, we knew had forever storybook love, and we knew that we had no choice but to tie our fates together, for once and for all.
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A few days before she arrived me and Dan sat around the apartment, doing what we usually did, smoking up and listening to tunes, we had gotten so deep into our music and our hanging out and bullshitting that we didn't even have a TV, we didn't need one. Dan popped "Goodbye Jumbo" into the CD player and we sat quietly and absorbed its deceptive genius and praised the heavens for it.
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And a few days later Lauren arrived and that record still sat in the stereo and I put it on and we listened to it in my room while laying in each other's arms, and "Sweet Soul Dream" came on and we knew we had found our song.
As bad luck would have it, a week or so into her visit I got very sick off of some old food I had eaten on a lunch hour at a lousy temp job I had to work a few more days of. I got sick, I threw up over and over again. A few hours passed and I felt a little better. We laid in that rickety old bed of mine together and we listened to this album and as we did I got a bit emotional, still remember it, it was a Thursday night, and I turned to her and said, I can't believe you just got here and now it's almost time for you to go, and she said to me, don't do this, not now, not yet, we have almost a week left my dear, and then this song played, and she stroked my fevered head and sang this song to me and I asked her, this would make a good wedding song, don't you think?
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Fifteen months later we stood in a room full of people, at our wedding reception, and someone announced that the time had come for us to have our wedding dance, and then this song played, and we danced, and I had an arm around her waist and my opposite hand locked in hers, and she looked into my eyes and I looked into hers and we swayed and danced, and the smile on her face as we danced, damn, I still, all these years later, cannot believe that I made another human being feel as happy as she looked at that moment as we danced, but I did, it's true, and then and there I saw perfection, I saw heaven, and we danced and we knew, we knew what we had.
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Like any couple that lives together for the better part of a decade and a half, we had our ups and our downs, we had our high points and we had our fights, definitely way more high points, but still, I listen to this song tonight, with this most recent and most bitter anniversary just behind me, this anniversary which seared and scarred me in ways I could never have even dreamed of a year ago at this time, and I realize with gratitude that we reached heights I never dreamed existed: we had our sweet soul dream, and even death cannot take that from us.
And now she is gone, to some other place, a place as unimaginable to me as the heights we reached, as unimaginable as the depths I have reached since her passing. Against her own will and against her expressed and fervent desires, she has left us behind, but still, tonight, I think, and perhaps I only kid myself to make it through, but I insist that in spite of all of this suffering and all of this time apart, she is still my sweet soul dream, I insist that she lives on, in those sweet soul memories and in the sweet everyday smiles of the three beautiful children she so unwillingly left behind. I hear the notes of this sad and beautiful song, tonight, I hear the notes and I can still see her cornflower-blue eyes gazing with love deep and true into mine on that long-gone July day, and I realize that as crazy as it seemed all the way back then, I need something seemingly even crazier now, I need to believe that my sweet soul dream lies out there, somehow, somewhere, oh, I need to believe that my sweet soul dream, my love, can somehow tonight hear this same sad and beautiful song, I need to believe that somehow she can hear, with me, our song.