I don't think I've mentioned it here yet -- maybe in passing -- but I was going out with her for a while at the beginning of this month. We put it on hold, due to some emotional and environmental stress on her end that she has to address before our relationship as anything more than friends can pick up again (thankfully, this all transpired on good terms).
Anyway, Geanine was having a rough time last Friday, and this didn't have her in the most upbeat of moods. Nobody, it seemed, had been sparing her many kind words, and she was buying into all those negative views of herself that were being suggested; to be quite honest, it pissed me off to know that people could tell her she wasn't "good enough," and that she would believe it. So I grabbed the copy of Something Corporate's CD Leaving Through the Window I had been meaning to give her for about a week, grabbed my bike, and hauled ass to her house.
It was almost funny when I pulled up out front and felt my phone buzzing in my pocket: she had sent me a text while I had been on my way, telling me that her mom was feeling under the weather and that she would probably vent this unpleasantness by not letting Geanine see me for a few minutes.
So I called Geanine, hoping that she was wrong.
She was right.
So I did the only thing I really could do: I left the CD in a relatively concealed spot on her front steps, sent her a text to let her know, and rode my bike back home.
Leaving Through the Window has always held something for me. It's some of the first music I ever owned; my brother gave it to me. I can listen to those songs no matter what mood I'm in, and whenever I'm in a tight spot, they've always helped me out. Any partiality in genre or artist for me is fleeting, but SoCo has always been there, always been the fallback. I figured, what with Geanine not being in the best of places, Leaving Through the Window would help...and I guess I figured right. By the end of that night, even if I didn't have her in a completely different mood, I had at least put a smile on her face, and that was good enough for me.
But the real moment came last night.
Danny's Boy Scouts troop had just had a Bingo Night fundraiser; I had gone, and Geanine and her mom and her dad and her brother had, too; Danny and Peter and Tamis and Chris had been there on duty (yes, I hang out with a bunch of Boy Scouts). About halfway through the event, Danny came by with one of those styrofoam cups of coffee; he let me finish it. This whole time I was listening to Something Corporate on my iPod and sitting next to Geanine and kind of regretting not being as close as we have been. I guess the music eventually got to me; between two particular rounds of Bingo, I used the pencil I had been given (to fill out my sheets) to etch into the styrofoam cup: "Some things never do change/Never do change...", a lyric from "Cavanaugh Park". I sat back and skipped out on the next round of games (and the next), etching more and more Something Corporate lyrics as my iPod provided the songs on shuffle. By the end of the night, I had covered that styrofoam in music. The one part that I think really stood out was in the middle of the cup: "I want to save you/ I want to save you/ But I need you/ To save me too..." (Writing this elicited a little bit of a good feeling, and a little bit of longing for more good feeling: upon first hearing the song, Geanine had declared that she was officially stealing it -- I pleaded, "Can we at least split it?" She agreed, and what do you know, in the settling dust of our flash-fire stint as a couple, we had just discovered our song.) At eleven p.m., Danny's troop called closing time. I hurriedly grabbed my latest Bingo ticket as a souvenir, stuffed it into the styrofoam cup, and everyone headed home. Me, Danny, Geanine and Geanine's mom and dad and brother were all packed into this little car, and for the sake of comfort I had my arm around Geanine, and she had her head on my shoulder. During the somewhat-claustrophobic drive, she asked her mom to turn on the car's CD player and hit track 1.
Next thing I knew, we were singing "I Want to Save You" in slightly off-beat harmony, because the volume was pretty low and we couldn't hear it all that well, but that didn't matter to us right then. We were just in the moment. Just singing. Just enjoying the comfort of each other's warmth on such a goddamn freezing night. Once the song was finished, I laughed, because I knew that if my brother could have seen me right then, he would have known what it meant to me, and he would have known how much I would have thanked him.
And in that moment, I swear we were infinite.
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