Image credit: Photo by Estrella Esteve on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons

"I can't hear this song without thinking of you," I said to Mark as The Cure's "Just Like Heaven" came on my music mix a few days ago.  It reminded me of falling in love with him in college: how he made me scream, and laugh, and promise to run away with him, how dreamlike and obsessive it was, and how I lost him for a time.

There are thousands of songs in my iTunes library at this point, collected over decades, and nearly every one has an association with some person or event.  Play "Footloose" and I'm with giggling with friends on my fifteenth birthday or Whitney Houston's "How Will I Know" and I'm seventeen, with my Walkman on, watering the azalea bushes in front of the house where I grew up and thinking about emhim/em, that boy that I, you know, like-liked.  Or play "Drive" by Incubus and I'm crying in my car as I drive to an S-Anon meeting in the early days of recovery.

When Mark admitted his sex addiction to me, not only did I grill him about the people and places associated with his acting out, I also questioned him ruthlessly about the songs he associated with the women he was with.  But Mark doesn't have the same relationship with music I do.  As a lover of words, I listen for the lyrics and the mood; I make it my soundtrack, a part of my story.  As the son of a musician, he listens for rhythm and and harmony and chord progression; and the music is new each time, just the way Shakespeare or Dickens are rich and fresh to me even after tens of readings.  Mark loves different things about the music and has different associations than I do.

Music wasn't part of his acting out for him, but for me, it's inseparable.  For a long time I couldn't listen to the radio or a random mix of music on my iPod because the wrong song at the wrong moment could send me spinning in to pain, and nearly any song could do it. (Do you know how many songs exist about some combination of love and heartbreak and sex and lust and infidelity?)

Tonight Mark and I decided that we both wanted to purchase the same new album, so I set to work trying to get our iTunes libraries to talk to each other while Mark put the kids to bed.  I signed on to Mark's computer, which I haven't done in years because it's too triggering; I find myself thinking of all of the painful things that have gone on on his computer in the past, and I become too tempted to spend hours emotionally cutting by searching through every file for evidence of wrongdoing.  This wasn't the case tonight, or not entirely.

After I successfully set the computers up to share music files, I decided to see if I could expand my music collection by checking to see if Mark had any music on his computer that I hadn't yet downloaded onto mine.  Of course he did.  Mark's personal collection had everything from Herbie Hancock to Bach to Toni Braxton.  The problem was looking at them triggered me.  Why had he downloaded that music?  What images came to his mind when he heard it?  Did he enjoy it for the music or did he hear some romantic chord or urgent beat or recording artist's sultry voice and think of hours spent with other women?  And come to think of it, hadn't he come home the other night singing something with awfully suggestive lyrics?  What put that in his head?

I had to step away from the computer and breathe.  Sometimes these moments, these tiny things — like the fact that something as small my husband listening to music he enjoys can be threatening and painful to me — take me by surprise.  And the act of being taken by surprise still surprises me.  And I'm sure that I'll soon have a song for that.