i hate winnepeg

I've recently rekindled a friendship with an ex-boyfriend. He was a very big part of my life for about four years, he was my everything. He was with me through many firsts, through most of college and was my best friend through ups and downs and everything in between.

When things dissolved between us, as things eventually do with high school to college romances, there was a void in my life that I couldn't fill. I had a new guy, a new life and a new perspective, but I missed him. When we were both finally to a point where our friendship could resume, I think both of us felt that troublesome void finally ebb, finally feel a little less empty. He's my friend again, and I'm so very glad he's in my life.

But this isn't really about him specifically, well it is, but isn't at the same time. You see, he was always really into music. Always providing me with new material for my auditory discoveries. He's since changed a little, as we all do, and the relationship is a little reversed now. He taught me to love music, to want to hear more, to find more that I loved -- never question, just enjoy.

But a few weeks ago, he gave me the name of a song, One Great City! by a band called the Weakerthans. I pulled up YouTube to listen, and I was surprised when I knew the song. I'd heard it before. Another guy, one not too long ago, had played it for me on his guitar. I'd lay there on his couch listening, quietly smiling at how cute he was, and how odd the lyrics were. The song was one I hadn't known, and I had asked who it was by, fully intending to look it up when I'd left and gone back to my other life, hundreds of miles away from him.

As I sat at my computer, all of a sudden my worlds collided, and I realized in that moment, listening to this beautifully written song about the monotony of life and the artful grace in its quirks, that everything is connected. That no matter how much I like to think I know myself, things like this moment throw me for a loop. I realized that everything builds on everything else, that as much control as I think I have -- there's another factor. These men were connected, not only through a love of this song, (I've always had a "type," and sometimes it's more obvious than others...) but through me and who I am.

I've always been one to believe that every person who comes into your life leaves a mark and changes you. It may not be a profound change, but it's there.

It amazes me how music, like smells, are incredible memory triggers. Even now as I write this, I'm listening to this song, singing along to its lyrics about a grungy city in Canada, I'm transported briefly to his couch in Massachusetts, then memories start to mingle, I'm in Iowa, in the car surrounded by snow. In the field under the tree...