My apologies to Kim, but I got in my car to make my second trip to the Fed-Ex store, and “Tear Drops On My Guitar” came on. I went to change the song (because yes, it’s on a Mix CD that I made) and then pulled my hand back, because it was almost ridiculously appropriate for the news I had just gotten.
I have a friend named Drew, who I will ocacsionally sing the first bars of this song to in order to annoy him (the song, for those not in the Taylor Swift know, is about her friend Drew, who she is in love with, who is in love with another girl. It’s classic high school stuff). But, for a very, very brief period, there was another Drew in my life, except it was spelt “Dru.”
It was a drawn out flirtation carried out via email, IMs and texts. It culminated in finally meeting at the disaster that was Chicago trip in the Summer of 2008.
I didn’t even like him that much, but I liked the idea of him. And at the time, I liked that he paid way more attention to me than O-L-B did. To be honest, I wasn’t attracted to him, but alcohol fixed that temporarily. And since then, he’s really fallen in my estimation. I find many of the things he says ridiculous, if not downright despicable. I was an apologist for him for many, many months after the disaster of Chicago, but there came a point when I realized there was nothing worth defending. There is literally nothing about him that I find attractive or desirable. The only reason he was ever a big deal is because of the way in which I tricked myself into thinking we had all this potential. In retrospect, it was an obvious means of distracting myself, but at the time, the loss of that potential seemed horrible. It’s funny. You always hear the expression “I don’t know what I ever saw in him” and I’ve always thought that that expression was insincere, the defensive words of a wronged woman.
But really: I don’t know what I ever saw in him. I forced myself to see things there, and then I made him respond to me. It was never that I liked him, it was that I had to make him like me.
He just announced today that he’s engaged. And for whatever reason, that felt weird, just for a second.
And while I sang along with the song without the least bit of sincerity, I still thought of that Dru, just this one time.
Says:
That’s so interesting, because even though this song doesn’t remind me of a Drew/Dru, it does remind me of a “I don’t know what I ever saw of him” situation that I had. My boyfriend at the time broke up with me on Valentine’s Day 2007 (yes, you read that right) and I was CRUSHED. This song came out that year and I used to listen to it and bawl my eyes out. Now whenever I hear it I’m reminded of that time and how I have no idea what I ever saw in him. Oddly enough, my boyfriend now is named AnDREW.
December 11th, 2009 at 2:17 pmSays:
“I didn’t even like him that much, but I liked the idea of him”
This rings a bell. A friend of mine keeps telling me that it’s not that I like this guy, it’s that I like the idea of him. I kind of understand where she’s coming from but then the clarity disappears and I have no idea what she meant. I’m not at the stage where I can separate the two. Yet.
December 12th, 2009 at 6:53 am