Tangled Up in Blue

Last night I was reminiscing a little bit more about my outspoken British boyfriend, which explains why I woke with this song in my head. It was such a long time ago now, but it seems like yesterday that he played it for me in his dorm room, singing along with Bob:

Early one mornin’ the sun was shinin’,

I was layin’ in bed

Wond’rin’ if she’d changed at all

If her hair was still red...

I like to think that when he hears this song now, he thinks about me, too -- and I'm guessing he probably does. Besides the general excitement of being with him -- he was in a band, he was super funny, he had a really sexy northern-England accent (of the un-moneyed variety), he spent a few hours in "the clink" one night for assaulting someone that he caught looking at my ass (at the time it seemed romantic, now it seems like a sign of a rage disorder brewing) -- we had a really great connection. He came to visit me in the States after I got back home, and we had some good times; I have one particularly fond memory of being up at my cabin, out in the sun on the dock with his guitar, helping him write songs. But he started distancing himself from me pretty much from the moment he got here, declaring: "I'm not going to be waitin' by me mailbox every day, Sarah, just livin' for your letters. So you can forget about that."

Yep, the summer of '92 was the last time I saw him in the flesh -- but to this day I get a little bit of the same excitement when I see someone who shares his essence. My friend and I have long referred to these as "TW sightings" -- TW are his initials.

And although I would quite like to see him again -- I have some regrets about stones left unturned -- it is probably better that I both carry with me and continually encounter these positive aspects of him in others -- since the chances that I would still be able to see and enjoy them in him are not good. My friend told me she saw him a handful of years ago. He'd become a bobby (police officer) and was humorless and unfriendly, at least the night she saw him. That broke my heart a little bit.

More years have passed now. Maybe, like me, he's got his joy back now, or maybe he's still tangled up in blue. I don't know. I'm hoping for the former -- and enjoying Bob's variation on our story:

She turned around to look at me

As I was walkin’ away

I heard her say over my shoulder,

"we’ll meet again someday on the

avenue,"

Tangled up in blue.