I let you pick our first dance. Van Morrison. The Way Young Lovers Do. At the time I thought it was perfect for us, light as air, breezy passion, giddy words that rang in astonished awe at the rush of falling in love. It was terrible to dance to though. All that jazz inflected triple time signature, bass bounding around like a badly behaved puppy, untamed. My feet followed the drums, snare skittering out that three four time, whilst yours followed the melody, all straightforward until Van, spirit moving him, starts scatting and be-bopping, channeling something outside of the reach of words. We both, independently at first and then progressively in synch with each other, started to punctuate our dance in time with the horns: you punching the air, me playing air trombone. I don’t even know if there’s a trombone on it but it seemed the easiest brass instrument to mime. After a couple of minutes, when the bass runs finally defeated our hips, gamely searching for a groove to slide into, you pulled me close and kissed me. Then, laughing, we beckoned everyone else on to the floor. 

Later on you’d always talk about that dance and that song in particular – it was one of your signature anecdotes – and tell people that none of the individual elements made sense on their own but together – together – they created something perfect and pure. People usually got it. Sometimes you felt the need to underline the metaphor, either implicitly through smiling across at me or taking my hand; other times you really hammered it home – “we were those young lovers, weren’t we?”. I would return your smile. Agree in the times you were making the point more pointedly.

What you didn’t talk about, and maybe I only put it together later, was that Van never recreated that song. Or that performance, at least. It was a lightning-in-a-bottle moment in time, musicians letting fly, nailing the heady euphoria of love in three minutes flat. Nothing written down, no chords, no notation, all navigated in nods and looks and instinct and feel. A one take deal. When I listen to it now it sounds like it could just as easily fall apart at any moment as make it to the end. The song’s preserved forever as recorded but love doesn’t really work like that: you can’t sustain it based on a distantly remembered moment in time.

It’s not the most important thing but I hate that you ruined Astral Weeks for me. Ruined all of Van for me. You’d insist on playing “our” song  so often that eventually I got curious about the rest of the album and discovered something I could escape into, disappear inside its meandering, meditative musings. That all went after we split: all I could hear was you. For a while I made myself a playlist that consisted of the album without “Young Lovers…” but I couldn’t fool myself. The songs would skip from Cyprus Avenue straight to Madame George and all I’d hear was the absence of you. Van would be lost in his loves to love to love to loves to love reverie and when I should have been mesmerised, lifted out of the mundane, spinning in the ether, instead I was earthbound, thinking about your indiscretions. Your indiscretions don’t deserve polite poetry. Your fucking around. Your betrayals. Your others-that-weren’t-me. 

Loves to love to love to loves to love other people but not me.