Song: "Lightning Crashes" by Live
Event: Live Concert with Girl With Whom I Was Hopelessly In Love
Laying on a ratty blanket that someone had brought from their basement, staring up at the stars in this outdoor concert area while the band played, fairly stoned on shitty high school grade weed, I had very little idea what was going on. And I couldn't have been happier.
The details are hazy and most likely glazed over with a thick spackle of nostalgia, but I remember that a bunch of us went to go see the band Live on the tour for their latest album Secret Samadhi. Luscious Jackson and ManBREAK opened for the band, which was when we all decided it was time to smoke a few joints and wander about the beer splattered lawn of Great Woods in MA (now known as the "Tweeter Center").
The only girl with us was a beautiful woman that, for the purposes of anonymity and privacy, I'll refer to as "Tabitha." I was hopelessly devoted to Tabitha - my stomach would get all gurgly in that most cliched of ways when teenagers believe themselves to be the first to ever discover Love. We would spend hours on the phone talking about nothing. Many mixtapes were exchanged along with furtive glances. When we would hold hands, my heart would pound in my ears and it felt like it wanted to burst from my chest - ruining whatever romantic mood with a splattering of blood. It was the type of love that resulted in bad poetry and worse daydreams.
Of course, ours was a forbidden love - as she had a boyfriend. And for whatever reason, she kept vacillating between us, promising one thing to one of us before cooing with the other. I look back on that, my wooing a girl with a boyfriend, with a great deal of shame and guilt, but at the time I didn't care. I would look into her eyes, with its mixture of green and blue shimmering under the starlight, and know that it being on the hook or in a terrible moral position was worth it.
I don't remember if she was still dating her boyfriend the night of that concert, all I remember is that we stole many a blushing look at one another, we held hands in the dark, and both of us were so nervously in tuned with each other that we didn't even register half of the playlist that night. On the way home, Tabitha and I would lament that Live hadn't played this song or that song, and our other friends would tell us that they had - how had we missed it?
So there are many songs out there that remind me of her and my time as the other man dangerously tempting a woman who was "spoken for" - all those songs on mixtapes, those bands we introduced each other to, the songs playing the few times we took our mutual attraction to a physical level - but it's this song that I didn't hear at the concert that takes me back to those days the fastest. Hearing this song, I get a dopey grin, feel the sweat rise in the palm of my hand and remember the concert where I heard nothing. It was a great show.