A friend sends me a play list of favorite songs and I slide the CD into my car stereo. Suddenly, instead of the news, I’m listening to Frank Sinatra.
Instead of driving my car, I’m lying in my dormitory bed at college, singing “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning.” I know all the words and all the feelings by heart—by broken heart.
I am 19 years old and have left my boyfriend at home. He hasn’t written for a week and I’m sure the relationship is over. Sure my life is over. Frank Sinatra understands. He’s there on the album cover in the light of a street lamp, smoking a cigarette and staring into the darkness.
He knows what I know: love is everything and love is pain. I lift up the needle on my stereo and set it down again at the beginning.
Now, all these years later, I am pushing the replay button but I’m smiling instead of crying. Smiling to think how young I was, how pure my suffering—because it was almost untouched by experience.
Now, I know how complicated love is—how it can be lost and found more than once. Even so, I still sing along with Sinatra, sometimes in the wee small hours.