Three Boys I Loved: Lille’s Favorite Love Songs

Posted: August 29th, 2009 | Author: Lilledeshan Bose | Filed under: Los Angeles | Tags: break ups, bright eyes, love, ryan adams, smoking popes, spiral staircase, talking heads, the magic numbers |

1998

J and I fought all the time. It wasn’t that I didn’t love him, I did, but I knew I wasn’t in love with him. He was a rebound, a boy I met after my first true love knocked the wind out of me. When J and I met I was doing crazy things like dancing in typhoon rains and writing love songs in G-D-Em-Am chord progressions, for the boy who broke my 20-year-old heart.

J saved me, in a way: he taught me what a real relationship was. How the mundane, the annoying, and the sweet were all rolled up together, indivisible, as if you’d rolled up oatmeal and raisins in cookie dough. J would pick me up from work in a heavily guarded building in the middle of a busy business district. I was almost always late, but he’d drive around the block for 30 minutes until I appeared, breathless and running, by his door. I bought him a pug. I met his parents, we vacationed in Cebu with his family. Sometimes he would have lunch with my mom without me, they liked each other that much.

But the fights were always terrible — I always felt that he was holding me back, from someone, something, somehow. I remember a particularly bad one: we were eating at a pretty high-end restaurant, the kind with oysters on half-shells served with mignonettes and Lalique wine glasses. I told him I couldn’t eat while looking at his face in front of me, and could he please leave. He got up, stood outside the restaurant and waited for me to finish dinner, then brought me home.

Our relationship may have evolved out of my need for a lot less emotional intensity, but it taught me a lot about the push and pull of coupledom. I learned how to give of myself, I held my anger. However, the feeling of being trapped never left me– it contradicted the fact that I grew to love him exponentially the longer we were together. I didn’t understand it, and in the end we broke up after being together almost three years. I still consider him one of my dearest friends.

This was my song for J:

At one of those breaking up and getting back together moments, J told me this was his song for me.

2005

D played bass in a band that my (then) band gigged with fairly often; we’d bump into each other at random shows and eventually became each other’s band contacts. Setting up shows together evolved to watching shows of other bands together; he was always down to go to a concert and I always had a (+1). We were both music nerds; he knew everything there was to know about Brit-pop and LA bands, and he was constantly making me mix CDs. I was going through a crazy period in my life, though, and my feelings for him were constantly vacillating between fondness and love and friendship and nothing. He introduced me to Myspace, the Magic Numbers, and girls who stalked me and left me mean messages on the Internetz because they liked him.

“I never thought you wanted me to stay, so I left you with the girls that came your way”: I heard this Magic Numbers song and immediately related it to D.

One day, this song came on the radio. He said he felt this way about me: “Everybody wants to go forever/I just wanna burn up hard and bright/I just wanna be your firecracker/And maybe be your baby tonight.”

2009

I always thought this was the most beautiful love song written, and was so jealous of everything about it — Conor Oberst is such a poet, and he was lucky to have loved somebody else so much, he wrote this song, which inspired this video. I’d always tear up watching it, it was better than Oprah.

I always wanted to be one of the people in this video, and feel every uber-intense gooey seratonin-induced emotion that love gives you.  And now I am.

And I realize that I need you, and I wondered if I could come home.

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