SassyBlonde

There's just something about a well-played Elvis song that can completely take your heart and mind to another place.

I meant to write this entry a couple of weeks ago, on the occasion of mine and D's eighth anniversary, but I never quite got around to it with all of the shows and housecleaning and running around that I'm doing, which is entirely appropriate to the state we find ourselves in. Since the last anniversary entry I wrote, things have gone upside-down, backwards and totally askew in our lives. We've gone from stability and a shining almost-certain future to uncertainty and day-to-day survival.

The constant we've had throughout the summer has been that almost every night of the week, we pack up, pick up, and go play the summer show at the theatre, which this time happens to be based on a litany of Elvis songs. Now I don't know about you, but hearing Elvis songs of any fashion brings me vivid memories of watching the old movies in which he sang them, and none more so that Blue Hawaii. I don't have a memory of the plot at all, but I do remember him strumming whatever stringed instrument and crooning I Can't Help Falling In Love With You as my twelve-year-old self sprawled on the floor gazing up at the T.V.

More importantly, I remember singing the lyrics along with him and falling for them and the ideas they held wholeheartedly:

Wise men say
Only fools rush in
But I can't help falling in love with you
Shall I stay
Would it be a sin
If I can't help falling in love with you

It's kind of funny-- when I started out to write this post I had in my mind how sad the lyrics made me in some ways: the loss of my childish ideas about love and how I thought this whole soulmate thing works, the mourning for the easier direction life could have taken. The more I thought about them, though, the more it began to dawn on me that they're more enduring for me than I had thought: if I felt that way when I first met D almost half my life ago, I definitely still feel it now.

Like a river flows
Surely to the sea
Darling so it goes
Some things were meant to be

Though there's a lot of talking and working and compromising to do in the life we have together, the bare fact is that I can't live without him and don't want to. Warts and all, my gut feeling when he first held my hand is still there: take my hand, take my whole life too, for I can't help falling in love with you.