I’ve read quite a few times that linear time is an illusion, and that the reality is that what we think of as being past, present and future are actually all happening at once. This is way too much for me to wrap my little brain around, but then again, every once in a while I experience something that would seem to support that idea. For example, it must have been the early seventies when I was at a dance at my almost all-white high school. Back then, there were what were called “soul bands”—bands that played at clubs, school dances, rec centers, etc.—that usually consisted of white instrumentalists and black vocalists. Even though I was white, the music I listened to, the music that moved me—literally as well as emotionally--was Motown. And growing up in a suburb of Baltimore, it was easy to find radio stations that played it. Anyway, the band started playing a song and I found myself walking up to the bandstand so I could just listen. There was something about the chords that were sweet but haunting, alluding to something so sad but yet good that I was transfixed. I remember it feeling like I was listening to a song from the soundtrack of my life, but I couldn’t relate it to anything that had happened to me yet in the sixteen or so years of my existence.

Fast forward some decades, when I was beginning to know someone who would come to be a beloved, trusted friend and more—a man who was amazed to find out that not only was I as familiar with the music he listened to growing up as he was, but that I also loved it and considered it my music, too, even though I was from a different culture—one he had been taught early on to distrust. I don’t think he would disagree with me when I say that from the start, I was the one to assure him that times and society had changed, that the danger of a black man showing an interest in a white woman that had been very real when he was growing up in the country in a state south of the Mason-Dixon line had been diminished not only by changed laws but also by many (if not all) changed hearts as well. I will never forget his astonishment when he played for me the song that I had heard so many years ago at my high school dance and, surprised and delighted, I told him how much I loved it. I also remember experiencing once again the inexplicable deja-vu feeling I’d had the first time, as if I knew that this would be an important song in my life.

It’s the strangest thing to realize that even though you know without a doubt that someone loves you—and needs you—they just cannot move forward because the baggage they carry is simply too heavy. And while they may argue correctly that after all, they didn’t choose to carry such baggage, it becomes your decision to either remain in place with that person where he is stuck, or move forward without him. I’ve made my decision, and will not pretend that it was simple or easy. But it does, at last, feel solid and I am at peace—not meaning that I’m not sad, but rather that I understand fully my decision. And I finally found out why that song has always meant so much to me, why the sixteen year old me was so moved by it. The last time my dear friend and I saw each other, he left a CD for me with some old Motown songs on it, which I was able to bring myself to listen to today. The song was on it, and it was as if he was singing it to me.