I love music, all kinds of music - French, American, oldies, rock, pop, country, rap - I love it all. The funny thing is, I'm not capable of telling you who the singer is or what the song is called, but lyrics I can do. I have a photographic (or is that phonographic) memory for them. I often blame my bad memory on it - my brain is so full of songs that there's no room for anything else I can't remember what I did yesterday but yet I can remember every word to a song I haven't heard in ten years. But yet just hearing the beginning notes of a song can immediately transport me back in time. Things like the song that was playing during my first kiss, or when I got in the car on my very last day of high school, or what was on the radio when I found out my dad died. I guess that's one good thing about living outside the US - I'm usually spared from some of those memories because it's not music typically found on French radio.

More recently though, I've been hearing the string of songs that were playing during that last month I spent in the gîte, alone & lonely. There's a handful of them that, every time I hear them, immediately give me un gros pincement au coeur. I see myself in the gîte, crying & broken-hearted, and I can feel the extreme sadness I felt at that moment. The utter humiliation of it all. It still surprises me that your heart really can feel like it's breaking in two (or conversely, bursting with happiness).

Thanks to the summer hits, I've been spared from listening to the worst offenders since moving to Paris. But for whatever reason, a good chunk of them have been playing non-stop this weekend. On TV, on the radio, in the supermarket, on my mp3 player. There was no respite. My twitter buddies will know that this particular weekend, the song "Repenti" was following me around like a bad case of herpes. I posted about the song here, just one day before Fab and I broke up. What used to be "our song" was transformed into the break-up song. Suddenly the "j'ai trahi" took on so much more meaning.

But I love music too much to stop listening because of a few tainted songs. I have the radio on pretty much all day while I work. It's one of the reasons I prefer taking the bus instead of the metro - better reception. Given my song history though, I just have to accept that certain songs will forever be linked with certain memories. And I have to laugh at the irony of this song being part of the group. Fab, this one's for you.

COCOON On my way
envoyé par pierrenouvel