My Life in Songs

Music attaches itself to memories. Here are some of mine.

[musicalmemoriesofmine]

Forever Young - Rod Stewart

"Hey," I asked Tara, "What's with all the traffic around the arena tonight? Geez, we should have taken 65 instead." "Oh, there's a sign - the Rod Stewart concert is tonight." "WHAT? Hold on, I need to call my dad."  I dialed his number frantically.  "DAD! Where are you?" "At home, why?" he replied, calmly. ---------------------------------------------------------

He was driving me home after spending the weekend at his house. I was about sixteen, and our visits had become less and less frequent over the years. Every weekend spent with him was not only one away from my friends, but spent with his wife who yelled everything she said, a little half-brother who was obsessed with Power Rangers, and a little half-sister who wanted to show me every one of her toys every time I came over, and then try to imitate everything I did.

I dreamed of leaving everyone behind. I dreamed of not telling anyone where I was going, and going to college in San Francisco (the farthest away from my family that I felt I could get at the time). I dreamed of becoming something fabulous and maybe, just maybe, showing up years later to show off my husband and perfect children.  That would show him, I thought.I'll never be anything like him. When I have a family someday, you can bet I'll love them more than he ever loved us. Sure wouldn't be hard.

We drove in silence to the tune of WISH 99.7. Dad loved easy-listening and hits from years past.  I gave quick, unremarkable responses to his awkward questions about school and friends. After a short time, he gave up and just drove.

Right around the last stretch of Neville Island, he turned up the volume. "This is my song to you, my baby," he said in his low rumbling voice and thick accent. And when you finally fly away I'll be hoping that I served you well, For all the wisdom of a lifetime, no one can ever tell. But whatever road you choose, I'm right behind you, win or lose, Forever young, forever young...

"I hate Rod Stewart," I grumbled. "You might hate Rod Stewart, but you could never hate him if you see him live. He puts on the most amazing show in the world." "When did you see Rod Stewart live?" "I didn't, but I heard. Maybe someday."

It was the most we'd spoken the whole ride. He dropped me off and I happily leaped out of the car and up to my bedroom. He had a cup of coffee with Mom and went back to his real family.

---------------------------------------------------------------- "You're at HOME?" I couldn't believe it. Actually, I could. I knew when I bought him the tickets that he would forget. Typical Dad. What a waste of money. I heard Sheila's voice in the background. "Don't you do that to her - you're MEAN!"  I heard Dad's classic laugh, like the Count from Sesame Street - "Ah-ah-ah. We are in our seats, habibti. The show is going to start in 15 minutes." I laughed. Hard. He didn't forget. He was happy. He was laughing. Tara looked at me, puzzled. "He's already there," i said, letting her in on the joke. "Enjoy the show, baba. I love you."

[musicalmemoriesofmine]

Vamos Fugir - Gilberto Gil

I stood, overwhelmed, at the curb outside the airport.  Here I was. Alone. Sozinha. I pictured a map of the world, imagined dots where all the familiar faces were, way up north.

I thought of what I'd be wearing if I were still home. Probably my heaviest coat, my fur hood, my boots.  I thought of my father in the doorway, waiting to make sure I got to the car safely as always, turning his face away and quickly wiping the tears from his eyes.  I thought of the guilt I felt for thinking that it might be the last time I ever see him.

I thought of my mother, and how we made any excuse to spend just a few more minutes together at the airport before I went through the security line.

And I thought of Tara. My dear Tara. I wondered what she was feeling, and whether she felt like half a person in that moment as well.

All those thoughts in a matter of five seconds, as I looked around for an empty taxi, and looked out on the vast hills bordering the city of Rio de Janeiro.  Did I make a mistake?  In that exact moment, I felt that I had. What am I doing? What idiot picks up and moves to South America, with no family and no friends? I did this before, and I hated it.  What was I thinking?

I got in the taxi and heard Vamos Fugir.  Translation: "Let's run away".

I already did, Gilberto. I already did.

[musicalmemoriesofmine]

Sidi Mansour - Ya Baba

Karma Lounge had become a weekly thing. Katy grew tired of it quickly, but I had hooked Diana and Beliza.  It was something different, something cultural, and if they weren't in the mood then I bargained with them. One night at Karma in exchange for a movie the next day, or a different bar afterward.  The American bars didn't fill the void that Prague had drilled into me day after day; the Arabic bar did.

On a particularly empty Saturday night, I sat on the booth side of our table with my back to the wall. Beliza, sitting to my right, daintily nibbled at her lamb sambousek. Diana sat facing me. Behind her wild curly hair and her musical laugh I noticed a pair of eyes watching me. They belonged to a guy across the room, also sitting against the wall of this long rectangular room. He wore a purple sweater and a white cap, and was seated at a table with about six other guys. I decided he looked too young for me and turned my attention to my friends.

By about 1:00 AM, most of the people in Karma had left, and with a glance around the room I noticed there were only the two tables left, plus a couple of Czech women from a table I hadn't even noticed.

Sidi Mansour came on the sound system, and everyone but Diana, Beliza and me had jumped up to dance at the front of the restaurant.  We stood watching, and I saw the young guy dancing more joyfully than all the others. He ignored the women. He ignored the men. He was in a space all his own, dancing with his eyes closed. With every "Allah Allah, ya baba" his palms opened toward the sky, and he smiled a smile that took over his entire face. I had disappeared to him along with everyone else.

One of the Czech women came and grabbed a reluctant Beliza from our table, pulling her to come dance. Diana quickly joined her, never being the only one to miss the fun. I stood up with one knee still on my seat, half-kneeling half-standing. I couldn't take my eyes off of him.  As if he had felt that strained I-don't-know-what feeling in my chest reaching for him, his eyes opened, looked at me, and he held out his hand to me from across the room.  The others saw his attention turn to me, and also reached out, waving for me to join them. 

I walked over slowly, almost cautiously. I don't remember the walk through the tables, up the three stairs, and across the small dance floor. Maybe my body knew that walking over to him would end up ruining me. Turning me into the zombie version of myself. Breaking my heart in a way that felt like an actual break. A shattering. An explosion of my heart into so many pieces that, a year later, I wouldn't know if I'd ever be able to put it back together.

He smiled his smile that took over his entire face, and his eyes crinkled at the side. I took his hand and began to dance.

He leaned in. "I am Haykel." Tsharafna.

[musicalmemoriesofmine]

Al-bosta - Fairouz

I fidgeted impatiently on the corner across from Chapeau Rouge. Why did she always have to answer her work calls? Couldn't she just ignore them? It was after 11:00 PM and I was eager to get to the club. Derrick stood by, one earbud in. I could hear the bass pumping from his music.  Katy paced back and forth across the street, arguing in Czech.

I saw two middle eastern-looking guys crossing the street toward me. One started to sing a song by Amr Diab. My heart raced; they were the first Arabs I'd seen in Prague. Excited, I started to sing along with him. As they got closer, they both smiled.  The taller one asked me in Arabic where I was from. I responded, and he knew immediately that I wasn't a native speaker. He didn't speak much English, but he managed to get out, "Do you want to go to an Arabic party?" Katy was just finishing up her call and came over. The guy introduced himself as Mohammad, and his friend was Ibrahim. "Katy, they want us to go to an Arabic party, can we go?" She pursed her lips and raised her eyebrows, making the face that told me she didn't want to go. "Look," I added quietly on the side, "when do I ever complain about all the places you decide that we go? I need this. Please. Just one drink and if it sucks, we can leave." She could tell it meant a lot to me. She smiled and said, "Alright. Derrick, come on."  Ten paces behind, as always, Derrick followed. We walked through the small cobblestone streets of old town and before we knew it the fellow partiers had thinned out and eventually disappeared.  We were alone on a small, narrow street with two strange guys, one of whom had disappeared for five minutes during the walk. "In here."  They gestured to a door.  If I hadn't heard the beats of Arabic music pulsing from down the stairs, I would have run screaming. We walked down the stairs to find a nearly empty room. The front of the room was a wall of mirrors. The long room only had about twelve tables. The guys led us to one in the back, next to another party of guys.  They were all speaking Arabic. My heart soared. Finally, something familiar. We sat down and ordered drinks from a happy waitress named Hedvika, probably the first nice Czech person I had met in the cold, hateful city. Katy, ever sure of herself, slammed her menu shut and said loudly, "Orgasmus." We all laughed at her drink choice. I ordered my usual white russian and sat back.  Mohammad had disappeared, and his friend sat quietly across the table, smiling a tight-lipped grin at me. As the night went on, I learned that Mohammad had been off doing coke somewhere, and after I made it clear that I wanted no part of it, he and Ibrahim had gone. I leaned into Katy, "We can go if you want, I don't think we're going to meet anyone else here." "Are you having fun?" "Yes." "Then we're staying."  A guy from the other table turned around to face us. "Why are we all divided like this? We should join our tables, we're the only people here." He spoke English to us; he must have overheard us through the night.  He continued, "My name is Bader and these are my friends."  Squinting at me, he added, "You...you are an Arab girl, yes?" "Yes, my father is Palestinian." "Ahhh, mash'allah! Shou esmak enti?", he asked my name in Arabic. "Alia."

He turned to his friends. "She is Alia! Her name is Alia!"  The entire table stood, facing me. It happened so quickly that I didn't have time to feel nervous. They began to sing, "Zakartik ya Alia, w zakarti ayounik..."  I had never heard the song. It sounded vaguely familiar, but I didn't know from where. "Do you know the song?" asked one man. His name was Roger, and he was Lebanese.  I replied that I didn't. "It is your song! You must know it! You don't know Fairouz?" "I know Fairouz but I don't know this song." "It is your song, Alia, a song about your beauty and your eyes." I felt so welcome. The evening went on and on with our new friends. Bader, from Saudi Arabia, taught Derrick how to dance dabke. Derrick, a young black guy from the heart of Atlanta, taught Bader how to "walk it out."  Roger sang the same song to me at least every five minutes.  A half-Jordanian half-Czech guy whose name I can't remember now, which is probably for the best, took an interest in me.  Later we ate bread with hot sauce in my apartment, drank Arabic coffee, and fell into bed.  But that's another story for another time.

It was my first night in Karma Lounge. What I didn't know that night was that this tiny Arabic club in the middle of that dimly lit deserted street would change the entire course of my time in Prague.  That was where I met Haykel.

[musicalmemoriesofmine]

Ndirek Amour - Cheb Hasni

Every time he was happy, every time he was sad, every time he was homesick, every time he was angry with me, he put on this song. When he was happy. "It's my best song," he'd say, looking at me with his biggest smile, his eyes crinkled into little arches. Part of me wanted to correct his English, to tell him, "No sweetheart, you should say, 'It's my favorite song.'"  I always stopped myself; I loved his broken English too much. When he was sad. "Are you okay?" "Yeah," he said automatically, his eyes never leaving the computer screen. He was scrolling through his own Facebook profile. He scrolled and scrolled until he came to the song. Singing along, he'd continue to stare at the screen, closing any chat windows that might have popped up. I knew better than to ask who the girls were, it would only make him more upset. He could feel my silence, and would eventually raise his sad eyes to my worried ones. "I love you." "I love you, too." When he was homesick. I lay on the green Ikea couch, waiting for him to come inside. He'd been out on the balcony for at least ten minutes. He popped his head in the door, "Sweetie, can you please play my best song?" I sat up and found his song. When it ended, he yelled in to the living room, "Can you play it again?" Three plays later, he came inside. I could tell that he had been crying. He sat, watching video after video of deep sea diving in Tabarka. Then he looked through all his younger brother's pictures on Facebook, and tell me wistfully that his brother would be a doctor soon. I couldn't tell if he was proud or envious, or a little of both. When he was angry with me. "Why did you look at it? Why don't you trust me?" "Why do you talk to her that way? Does she even know about me?" "It's mine. It's mine, and you looked at it."  He wouldn't look at me. Looking back now, he wasn't angry, he was scared. Scared that he could be caught, and that he was almost caught already. He played the song so many times that I eventually got restless, and went out to the balcony. I leaned on the railing, the cold metal on my forearms making me shiver in the cold, Prague winter air. My tears fell down three stories to the cobblestone sidewalk. The man across the street was watching hockey. I heard the sound of his lighter and knew he had come out to smoke. I wanted to be angry, and I wanted to accuse him of what I already knew was true. But I knew if I looked up into those brown eyes, those beautiful brown eyes that could look directly into mine and lie without blinking, I would break. I'd be his again. His hand touched my back, and I stood to face him, still looking down. He touched my chin and I raised my eyes to his. "I forgive you, Aloush." "Thank you." I fell into his hug, hating myself.

[musicalmemoriesofmine]

Two Little Girls - Ani DiFranco

I backed the car out of Tara's driveway. We were on our way to Washington, D.C. for the first time.  We had heard a couple of weeks before that Aventura would be playing there and decided to make a weekend of it.

We had little else on our agenda. Tara had a huge crush on Abe Lincoln (if you knew Tara, then this wouldn't sound even the slightest bit strange), so seeing the Lincoln Memorial was big.  Other than that, we had a list of a few latin music clubs we'd googled and put the rest in the hands of fate.

Tara leafed through a packet of CDs. "Can we listen to Ani?" "Sure."  I had known it was coming. I didn't care much for Ani DiFranco and had only bought an album because Tara insisted that I would like her. I hate hippies. Well, all hippies but Tara.

From all the times that Tara had put this album on in the car, I knew most of the words and sang along. I felt so happy with Tara by my side. Most people think of a soulmate as a lover, the man or woman to have children with, to grow old side by side.  My soulmate is Tara, and any guy will be lucky to make it to second place in my life.

I glanced over at my best friend, her sunglasses sliding down her hooked nose, strands of her half-white hair falling in her face as she continued to flip through the book of CDs.  "You know," she said, "this song reminds me of us. You know, besides the part about the syringes in the arm...we never did that." "Hey, there's still time," I joked. We laughed. We continued laughing, talking, teasing for almost the entire 5-hour trip. Even the silences though were content. Easy. Some people don't need to fill silences, because even when their mouths are quiet their hearts keep talking.

Tara, my best friend, my soulmate, I dedicate this first post to you. 2 girls together, just a little less alone.