Friday, December 09, 2005

Fields of Gold play

We sit, her legs on my lap. The wedding CD playing, the soft one from the first hour between sets from the band.

It's moved on to Coldplay. God put a smile on your face. Before it was Fields of Gold. These songs tighten my chest a little, bringing back good, no, beautiful, but also sad and trying times that I am grateful to be through.

Coldplay was our car trip album for a while. OK, so we'd have a few CDs on rotation, but that one somehow made it back on again and again. Something about this particular song evokes a yearning for me. Optimism, but also, as it trips into the chorus and the bass frees up, things being beyond control and uncertain. We fought badly a couple of times. We didn't fight during the song, but I recall sitting, sad, as we drove in the aftermath.

We listened to that one after the worst fight. When I knew things were getting better when she looked up from where she'd been crying and called me a cuntferfucksmuss.

INXS Beautiful Girl has come on. We didn't listen to this at any special time. I just sang it to her often:
Beautiful Girl, stay with me...
I still love it, think it's their most underrated.

INXS now have something like Peter Andre crossed with the dentist from Manpower disgracing the memory of Michael. Look! I digress...

When she left London we'd been together a couple of months. We'd decided to move to Melbourne together. It was the biggest, most impulsive-yet-certain decision of my life. I knew that I loved her.

She gave me an Eva Cassidy CD. She told me to make sure I met her at the other end. And to learn Eva's version of Fields, and sing it to her when we met again.

As soon as I arrived at my friend's house where she was staying I walked through the house 'till I found a guitar, and met the challenge.

These things make me smile, 3 years on...

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