Impractical Magic

A song came on my iPod today that sent me reeling back, back to when my relationship with my ex-husband was still fresh and new and uncomplicated. It reminded me of how magical things can be when it first hits, when everything clicks into place and you realize that you have met that person. It was a song by The Used called "Blue and Yellow".
On the Fourth of July, 2005, Gino and I had been together only three days, and we were in the living room of his scuzzy apartment in Pittsfield. He asked me if I liked The Used, and as if on cue, my sister called me. The ringtone I had assigned to her number, coincidentally, was "Blue and Yellow". Gino fell onto me, kissing me and laughing along with me, both of us amazed that we had found that person.
When something so perfectly timed like that happens, it is hard to overlook the fact that it is a coincidence and not magic. I realize how little care I took in managing myself over the course of my relationship with Gino because I had no idea that the ties we had wrapped around each other could disintegrate. I was naive, and I think I still have some naiveté inside me that I cannot shake. I breezed through everything that should have been awkward and ungainly because I didn't see why I should tread lightly. When his mother introduced me to her sister as "Gino's girlfriend" and Gino groaned quietly in a please-Mom-play-it-cool manner, I turned to him and asked, "Well, what would you call me?" and he answered back, "No, it's cool. You're my girlfriend."
He said "I love you" first, and of course it seemed completely natural and not at all rushed, but looking back I realize how crazy that is. When he said it, we were walking home from the bar he worked in at roughly 2 in the morning, and we had only been seeing each other for a week. It didn't matter that we were so young, that we had, essentially, just met, that he was so poor that he ate spaghetti with oil almost every day. Nothing makes sense when you fall in love, and everything is magical.
I had never met a man who had so many things I was looking for in another person. He was good-looking, he got almost all of my nerdy movie references, he liked the same music I did, and his family was from the same part of Italy that my family was. Our first real conversation was about olives, of all things, when he noticed I was drinking a martini without an olive because the bar had run out. "I love olives. My favorite olives are kalamata olives," he said.
"Have you ever had olives Calabrese?" I asked.
"No. I am Calabrese, though."
"Me too, that's funny."
It's silly, but growing up with an Italian grandmother as sweet as mine is makes you want to please her, tell her that you are going to give her more great-grandchildren, and that they will be Calabrese. Every Italian guy you meet looks a little more attractive if his ancestors probably waved to your ancestors in town. We had so much in common and we just liked each other so much and I wasn't scared or ill-at-ease around him. Everything happened with so little negotiating, with none of the push-and-pull I had heard my girlfriends complain about, and I convinced myself that it was simply because we were both looking for the same thing and we had found it in each other. The buyer's remorse Gino is experiencing now cannot erase everything I learned while I was with him, and how unreasonably we both loved each other for a long time.
I was driving around the Berkshires with my good friend Kiki the other day and I asked her if she wanted to her the song that was playing on my iPod when I got into the car on the night Gino told me he wanted a divorce. The iPod was on shuffle and I was not even paying attention to it- flicking the music button on the touchscreen was just a reflex, something I always did in the car after my seatbelt was buckled and I had turned the key in the ignition. It was so perfect, it seemed almost unfair- "Skinny Love" by Bon Iver. The only song that could have been more perfect would have been our wedding song, which was "I Will Follow You Into The Dark" by Death Cab For Cutie, but thank god it was not that. Naturally, I sobbed and screamed all the way to Tony's house while this perfect, melancholy voice wrapped me up in its sadness. Even at the end, at the conclusion of the marriage, horribly magical things were still happening.