My Name, My Song: Pt. 2

On the Sunday before our final, the end of the second of our long study days, Joe sent me the lyrics to a song he had decided was mine. With phrases like "This time you'll listen to the movement of your body/How it keeps on despite you and it frightens you" and its chorus of "Jenny, you're barely alive," he was right. He went on to explicate how it fit, moving his hands the way he does when he's explaining something important or beautiful, the same hands that describe synapses and plasticity, the hands that can't stop telling me how perfectly The Postal Service describes DC every time we listen to the first track of Give Up.

So, we listened to the song together, letting the phrase "metal bars" stop us in our tracks, if only for a nanosecond. Letting it constantly remind us of me.

When I got home, I sent him the song my parents had chosen for me, chosen as "mine," when I was a baby, just as they chose songs for my siblings when they were born. My song was "Jennifer, Juniper" by Donovan, and I often imagine it as a backdrop for those first tenuous months, when my parents--one week out of college--found themselves saddled with a tiny needy person. I had colic, and I can see my parents walking around the room with me, during the day or late at night, singing the words, a love song to their first-born.

When I walked into his house the next morning, he played "Jennifer, Juniper," and so it was the next few days that we began our days with the song my parents had chosen for me, ending it with the song he had chosen for me. Each day somehow managing to travel through an entire lifetime, from a time I was "entirely replaceable" as he would say and had nothing but two people who called me "Jennifer, my love," to a time when I "could not be replaced" as he does say, a time when I drive over treasures in the street because I must, if only so I can stay barely alive.