With You

Even though we dated in the early 00's, I associate you with the 80's pop music we used to sing in dark karaoke booths. I hadn't heard Toto's Africa, or Bowie's China Girl before hearing your thin, but earnest, voice singing them through a microphone with the reverb so high that we could have used it as a blanket. Even now, years later, when I hear "the rains down in africa," I see your profile back lit by a television monitor with lyrics superimposed over the imagine of a slender teenage girl walking around what appears to be Prague at sunset.

Our song was With or Without You, by the band U2, and I always insisted on singing it. Sometimes you joined me, but more often than not you took the opportunity to take a break and refuel with cheap syrupy fruit-flavored liquor. I had never paid attention to U2 before dating you, but they were your favorite band and so I had become familiar with their music. Once you explained to me that With or Without You was really, as you believed all U2 songs to be, an allegory for the human relationship with God. I thought this was a plausible interpretation, but didn't fully understand why Bono would sing "She got me with...," if really he was speaking about Jesus. You found religious belief fascinating in the abstract, but irrelevant to your personal pursuits. We shared the unspoken agreement that religion was something people like us didn't need.

The lyrics didn't map perfectly onto our relationship, but there is a certain sadness and despair to the song that I related to and a sense of unavoidable and necessary suffering that our relationship shared. The lyrics are ambiguous, with three characters: the singer, "you" and "she." I identified with the body bruised and the one who gives themselves away, who in your interpretation is perhaps Jesus, and I thought of you as "she." This was a hazy interpretation though; the lyrics weren't as important to me as the guitar at the beginning of the song. The guitar line is eerily simple and rhythmic. I felt as if this guitar line caressed me, as if it danced up and my body, sliding down my spine and tickling the back of my knees. The song no longer has such an effect on me. When I hear it now, in airports or streaming from anonymous cars as they pass by, I am reminded only of you.

I never liked the song's conclusion, when Bono screams hysterical descending "Oh's." I imagined a crowd of fans, mouths opened wide, joining along with this release, undulating before Bono posing onstage with outstretched, upturned hands, as an enormous monitor on the back of the stage projected this image back down on all of them. I didn't want any part of this communal catharsis. I found it revolting. I clung to the pain of our relationship as if it was something unique to me. It wasn't anything I thought anyone should ever be able to sing along with. It seemed crass and ruined the song.

One drunk karaoke night, when we sang our song as a duet, I dropped out for this final wail-along, and listened as you lifted your voice in the cry. As you sang, I heard a truth I didn't understand. You saw I had tears in my eyes and, misunderstanding my sentiment, sang along with even more sincerity.