My Perfect Summer Song

On a night like tonight, when the air is conditioned for remembering, this is the song that bundles all my summer nights of youth and college and band life and now and makes me relive them all in a few minutes. Even though there were years that went by that I didn't listen to this song or album, it still feels like it fits every moment. I feel like the lines "That's when I knew/that I could never have you/I knew that before you did...I'll get over you/You'll wonder who I am" sums up every relationship I was ever in, except for the one I was finally meant to be in. And I hate myself so much for that. But at the same time I love how the song floats feelings of bike rides on my red Schwinn through the cool night roads of Grantville. Smoking cloves in the parking lot of the Holiday Inn after work. Dreaming of sailing on back porches 'til dawn in some Midwestern city. Loving the way my life is changing in so many ways right now for the better. I think when things are changing in my life is when I love this song the most (The Cranberries' "Dreams" almost pulls an upset here). Because this song is a transitional song. It's leaving things behind and paddling out onto the ocean of the unknown. When you're a teenager, you feel like that's every other week. Your whole life is literally comprised of feeling so alone and so alive. It's less often now, but- as lame as it is- whenever I'm driving at night in the summer, the windows come down and this song comes on, and I'm that mixtape 16-year-old kid driving a Volkswagen Fox again (minus the braces, the chain necklace, the black lights in my car (wtf?), and... so, so many things). And it's kind of cool to still love that. Cause even though I'm almost twice that age, I still sometimes need to feel that age. I need to be naive and optimistic again, even if only for a stretch of highway and a side street and a parking space and the ending of a song collaborating with the turning off of the engine. I need that, just until I'm home.