Paradise Lost

There’s something about that song that always makes me think of being back there, in that particular time and place, driving around to find a quiet, private spot and parking up so particularly situated on the cusp of everything, ripe and ready for love. The spectacular sensation of surging hormones, heart beating hard and blood-flow burgeoning with typical teenage overkill. I remember the perfect potency of promise and feeling so powerfully alive at the burning urgency of it all…

Before the responsibility of pregnancy got in the way, before the adult realities of married life for two people so clearly unsuited and the sheer drudgery of perpetual poverty dragged me down and divorce divided us so definitively. Yet that song reminds me I was young and uncomplicated once, I yearned and loved and lusted freely along with the best of them. It reminds me with every note played and sentiment sung it is not our song, and never was; rather it is decidedly my song claimed in retrospect, long after you had left my life. Mine alone to carry with me always…

My female experience of paradise by the dashboard light ended not too much differently than Meatloaf’s testosterone-charged version, and all these decades later the thrumming rock music still brings back heated memories of my youthful desire and the oh-so-meaningful tongue-in-cheek lyrics still sear my sated soul, making me smile and shake my head at the fateful inevitability of it all.

I am growing old now and have moved on in life so far beyond every expectation. But watch me still play my song so unapologetically at teenage volume levels and you’ll see my eyes flash with the remembered brilliance of passion personified, the nascent climax of young love, a million sparkling fireworks exploding so suddenly across a long-lost landscape before fading away, limping so silently and softly into the scent-soiled night…

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