I met my precious wife, She Who Must Be Taunted, when I was 36 and she was 34. By some standards, that’s relatively old. And not only did we each have an adult life before we met each other, we had those lives not five miles apart. The chances that we were in the same room without meeting are actually relatively high.
Now, I’m insanely curious about the life she had before we met. I’ve seen pictures of her from that time, but those don’t really help a lot. So when I discovered that a dear friend of hers, whom we were visiting, had actual videos of my wife from almost 10 years before we met, well, I just had to see them. And I’ll tell you, I still haven’t made sense of how I feel about it.
It’s not that there was anything disturbing, troubling, or even surprising in those videos; they’re scenes of young people being silly together, in places I know and recognize, in exactly the way you might imagine my wife being at the age of 26. But the reality of that independent existence is, frankly, almost shocking.
You see, a relationship is like a song, in many ways. It’s a very real thing that is, at its heart, intangible – it’s made by people literally out of nothing, and its existence can be recorded, but not touched, the way a house or a car or a lamppost can be touched. The joy of love, the pain of heartbreak or betrayal, they’re all just things in our heads, but their impact is as substantial as if someone had tickled us, or drenched us with water, or caressed us with a silk scarf, or punched us in the gut. A song? The same insubstantiality, and the same impact.
And relationships, like songs, don’t exactly feel like they can be intentionally created, at least to me. I still marvel at the way my songs somehow, well, appear. I know that I’ve taken steps to cause them to appear, but no matter how long I sit with my rhyming dictionary, or how many slight variations of a riff I try out, or, how many pages of free writing I scribble down, it still feels like a set of incantations; the song appears when it wants to, in the form it wants to, and the idea that I wrote it is just a little suspicious, even though it can’t have come from anywhere else. As I look back on the first few months after having met my wife, I know that I didn’t set out to fall in love with her, or to determine to marry her; it’s simply something I knew, one day.
So when I can look back in time, at this video, and see a day when my wife didn’t know me, and when I didn’t know her, it’s deeply unsettling, like somehow being able to know what it would be like to live in a world before “Waterloo Sunset” had been written, or “Born to Run”, or “The Kid” (Buddy Mondlock; one of the world’s great songs), knowing that they would be written, and knowing what the world was missing for their absence. It’s a pain felt for the past, from the future.
But – and this is where the analogy falls apart – it’s not just the window into the past that I find jarring. After all, if I were to see a video of myself from the same time, I wouldn’t be nearly as troubled. It’s the idea that there’s this parallel existence – a life history which will collide with mine, one that already existed – that really makes the difference here: while I don’t necessarily believe that I really, really wrote the songs I’ve written, I don’t for a moment think that they’re already out there somewhere, just waiting to bump into me one afternoon.
Yes, someday, perhaps tomorrow, I’ll write another great song. But I’ll never be able to remember what it felt like before the song was written. My window into my wife’s past, on the other hand, is just a DVD away. And I don’t really know what that means.