The Voice of the Turtle

There was a time when I did not believe I had fallen in love until a song appeared to seal the union. This might have has something to do with the fact that I was largely dating women and was really falling in love with men. But that wasn't the surface story to be sure. But much of the role of "our song" typically came into fruition once the relationship came to a crashing close. Then a stray song on an am station could be guaranteed to stop me in my tracks and bring tears to my eyes at what had been lost - or in fact, never found. Ah youth, true love and melodrama.

But if for every woman there was a song, for some men there was one too. For whatever reason, however the women's songs represented my doomed connection with that woman - the song of men was always a song of distant admiration.

Sam - who I spoke about two weeks ago - chose his own song, and a fitting one it was. Smalltown Boy, by Bronski Beat about a young man who, picked on and beaten by the other boys for being different, defiantly claims his identity and is forced to leave town.

"You never cry to them, but to your soul..." and Sam might well have thought on those words on his final flight to New York. No one ever saw him in weakness.

I hadn't realized I had been in love with Sam until I wrote that piece two weeks ago - but where the songs of women mostly make me smile and sometimes chuckle when I hear them today, that one still stops me in my tracks.

There was a man, in the same years that I did believe I had to come to love. In hindsight I am not so sure, and the song that represents that time for me is telling. With Sean I got to do all the things my body wanted, but none of the things my heart desired. Everything remained cloaked in secrecy, to a degree even between us.

I want to walk in the open wind
I want to talk like lovers do
I want to dive into your ocean
Is it raining with you?
- from Here Comes the Rain Again (Lennox/Stewart 1983?)

It was a song of love almost but never quite becoming - and it never did. I wouldn't walk in the open air for another seven years.

Lately, don't laugh, scripture and some mystic poetry has filled the place where music once took in the depths of my heart. Have I been single too long?

My beloved spake, and said unto me, Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away. For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land
Song of Solomon 2:10-12