Memories of a Former Life

As I sit here jamming out to all 75 Police tracks (OK, most of them... I skipped a few) in preparation for the concert next week, the wise and mighty iPod has seen fit to shuffle them in such a way that "Hole in My Life" is the last song. It reminds me of how, back in the day, Sting once said that the group would always close their shows with "So Lonely," because he loved the irony of closing out a gig in a massive stadium full of people with a song about desperation and feeling isolated. The irony here in my living room is similar.

I'm excited for this concert not just because it's going to be ass-kicking music from a group that I never believed I'd see on stage again. The Police were the defining music of my early college years. They were the end-all and be-all to this tender and as yet unbattered 18-year-old, at a time when I was still struggling to figure out who I was, and my place in the universe. Certain songs bring me immediately back to a time and place when the world was my bitch, anything was possible, I just had to figure out where I wanted to go, and how I wanted to get there, when I had no preconceived notions about what the universe might expect in return. Sometimes, a chord change is all I need to smell the cold Syracuse night air.

My introduction to the blonde trio came from a friend I'd made my freshman year of college. She lived down the hall in the dorm, shared a similar taste for biting sarcasm, and let me crash on her floor when my stuck-up bitch of a roommate was intent on having sex whether I was in the room or not. We roomed together the following year, visited each other during the summer, and when I moved to Chicago to find what it had to offer at the age of 20, she followed eighteen months later. She was my best friend and confidant for the next fifteen years, and even my ex-husband once told me, "You two have something that I just know better than to get between." It was me that took her to the airport when her father died. It was her I called when my marriage fell apart.

And then, in 1999, she cut me off. Broke my heart. Left for reasons I will never understand.

I've made my peace with it, with the fact that what happened will always be unknowable to me. But I've also had to find a comfort level in being OK with her being part of my past, that there are things in my world, important things that I don't want to let go of, that will just always be inextricably linked to the memory of that friendship. Like listening to The Police.

It's funny, because it really seems that her departure was the starting point of when things really turned around for me. I moved to another city, found new friends, went to school and embarked on a whole other life that is wonderful and fulfilling in ways that 18-year-old couldn't possibly have imagined. I realize now, in retrospect, that she had a lot of negativity, her world was so full of things she couldn't do... Hers was a life filled with holes. And mine, now, is a life of anything but.

So, by this time next week it will all be over except the ringing in my ears. I expect to have a completely righteous, rockin' good time, as part of a long weekend spent with people I love, because life is good.

And here's to you, Jane. I hope you get to see Sting 'n' The Boys when they come near you, wherever you are. I hope jamming out to "Regatta de Blanc" takes you back to a time when happiness came to you a little more easily. And I hope your life has a few less holes these days. Mine sure as hell does.