First Cuts Run Deep

WARNING: RAW EMOTIONS ON NAKED DISPLAY

The other night I wandered into the Edge, one of the Castro’s more decrepit bars. It’s a not-very-popular leather bar – more dark and dingy than edgy. As usual it was mostly empty – and I would’ve left, having spent all of 5 seconds in the bar which is about how long I usually spend there – except that they were playing Wish You Were Here.

Wish You Were Here. Pink Floyd’s impossibly beautiful ballad to ex-band member Syd Barrett - who like Icarus had crashed and burned having flown too high and too close – not to the sun – but to a Lucyous diamond encrusted night-sky. It was an improbable choice of song for the bar and for a Thursday night. Its also a song that never fails to reach into my memory bank, pull out and play back, in my mind’s eye, videos of my most deeply buried, beautiful memories of my first relationship; my first love.

Wish You Were Here was the first Pink Floyd song I liked. And Pink Floyd was the band that I discovered and came to love because I had to listen to their songs for hours everynight and for large parts of the day everyday, for nearly three years…lying next to the man I loved. (He was a card-carrying member of the Pink Floyd Fan Cult in my engineering school - that pretty much included everyone who wasn’t deaf. And I use the word cult instead of club advisedly).

If life has a sound-track, and long stretches of mine do; then Pink Floyd, The Doors, Nirvana and others – but mainly Pink Floyd – provided the sound-track to those three too-short years. I continued to listen to those songs for quite some time after our parting of ways…just to re-watch and re-feel; relive the best moments of those days:

Lying in bed together at night, each of us reading a book – he, something along the lines of Sartre; me, something along the lines of Stephen King. Watching the latest Bollywood blockbuster on-screen – reluctantly on his part – and just knowing exactly why the on-screen, in-love pair was singing; because my heart seemed perpetually filled with song too. Dedicating a song at the MTV booth during the college festival to the only girl in the branch because I just had to, had to!, dedicate a song...and couldn’t really dedicate it to the person I wanted to openly. Spending the entire day away from each other in different classes and loving it; savouring the anticipation of meeting up again in the evening. Nestling in the crook of his arm throughout one night on a train when a severe case of sinusitis made it difficult for me to sleep without having my head propped up…never hearing a comment about how that benumbed his shoulder. Having him meet my family and seeing how well he got along with all of them – how much they grew to like him. Being introduced to and coming to love a whole new genre of music and of literature – Tolkien and Golding; Pratchett and Kundera.

During the good moments, you really couldn’t have found anyone happier than me. I’ve been in relationships since – some in which I cared deeply for, even loved, the other person. But never like that first time. Never did I agonize even years later about their failure. And never truly did the memories from that first time fade or become like silent home videos from someone else’s life that I could watch dispassionately when they switched themselves on.

Wonderful as it was, I’d always assumed that the relationship was doomed – that we would go our separate ways once we left college. He would find someone lovely and marry her (he did) and I would try my best to become straight (I did). When that actually started coming true – it just seemed to prove that I was good at analysis and forecast, even when it came to life events. I did make some clumsy, incoherent attempts at saving our relationship. But in the two years that I spent in silent and bitter self-congratulation on how accurate I’d been about the future course of the relationship, I never once believed I had any real chance at succeeding. If I had believed I did (have a chance), I might have done some things differently. My pal RD told me once, after hearing how it all ended, that perhaps I hadn’t tried hard enough to save it. I don't think he realized that his words sent me into a minor panic...because it hit me suddenly that he might be right. And then RD wondered why I spent so much of the rest of the ride reading the Economist instead of talking to him. :)

For several years after we were together no more, I was just grateful to have had the love I had, abruptly truncated though it was. That feeling has dissipated over time. Three years of being in love no longer seem sufficient to sustain me through the rest of my lifetime, especially when my financial advisor tells me I have at least another 60 to go and should be planning for them. What has attenuated too (somewhat), is the intensity of the emotional mini-orchestra that strikes up every time I hear a familiar rock melody from my engineering days. But it's still strong enough to stop me mid-thought most times.

Nine years since the relationship ended, why does a Pink Floyd tune affect me like it does – giving me a hollowed out, sinking feeling every single time; causing me to buy a beer in a bar I don’t like? Have I not moved on? Or maybe I have but not fully? Or maybe I’m over him fully but am now an abject case of once burned, twice shy. Is that why I’m pretty much a perennial singleton? Do I need some kind of – (gag alert) – closure? Did I really fritter away my chances of saving the relationship through a lack of faith? Or am I just falling prey to the very-American pastime of self-indulgent navel-gazing (That one’s easy, right? ;).

To tell you the truth, I don’t know. If there's one thing I've learned about relationships - its that they can be very complicated. So I don't know – whether I should’ve tried harder; whether it would have made a difference; whether we’d still be together if it had. If I had to take a guess, I'd say: I could have done with better closure, there probably was an element of once-burned-twice-shy in my relationships that followed and I likely am being self-indulgent. I'd also venture to say I’m pretty sure I’m over him. What I’m not over, is the happiness that I had when I was with him. I want those same or similar feelings back; I want to be in love again. And thats probably what Pink Floyd's abiding hold on me is about.

People tell me that first love is more about rampant hormones than real, true feelings and that the intensity is impossible to replicate. But just when I find myself thinking that that might be true; by a strange coincidence I’ll find myself in a theatre watching a movie like Dan in Real Life. Or on Youtube watching Joe Biden (yes, really) get all teary-eyed as he recounts how his second wife told him she wanted to marry him because his deep love for his first wife, who died in an accident, made her certain he could come to love her very strongly too.

So I still know hope. I also know, as I finish this post listening to the somber, mellow, achingly familiar tunes from Pink Floyd’s The Division Bell, that damn, Sheryl “The First Cut is The Deepest” Crow knows what she’s singing about.