(Part two of my exploration of the 25 songs in 25 slightly-more days blogging challenge — a way to bank and pre-schedule a few posts for JALC while I’m off a-travelling.)

Day Song 2: A song that reminds you of your most recent ex

Okay, here’s where I think that I am perhaps not really in the planned demographic for this challenge? Mr. Mezzo and I coming up on our fourth wedding anniversary, and we’ve been together for more than a decade. And then, to make things even more interesting hopelessly banal, I might as well cop to the fact that I’d taken myself “off the market” for about 4-5 years prior to meeting my Mr. (Long story not worth the telling: basically I realized around the age of 30 that I really needed to get right with myself before trying the relationship thing again. So, you see? Sometimes that old saying is true: love does come along when you least expect it!)

Anyhow, whichever way you slice it, it’s kind of been a long time since I had any sort of ex, so memorializing some fairly-insignificant romance with a song here just feels kind of — odd.

Instead, a brief recollection. When I was in grad school at UPenn, there were two main geographic areas where I and all my social circle lived. There were those of us who had chosen to use the Schuylkill River as symbolic boundary between work life and home and lived in a vaguely Center City/Rittenhouse Square(ish) locale. And then there was everyone living out west of campus and past 44th street.

So, one evening, some few years after I’d left school and started my non-profit career, I was driving up Pine Street, en route to hang out with a friend of mine at her apartment. And this song came on the radio:

Green Day, Boulevard of Broken Dreams. It hit me like a thunderbolt. I was at that precise moment driving along a two-block stretch that had housed the apartments of not one, not two, but three grad school ex-boyfriends. I’d lost touch with all of them by that point, so had no way of knowing if any or all of them had moved on to different addresses (towns? countries?). Didn’t really matter. The energetic signature of that song, playing at that moment, at that specific location, was just richer than rich.

I walk a lonely road
The only one that I have ever known
Don’t know where it goes
But it’s home to me and I walk alone

I walk this empty street
On the Boulevard of broken dreams
Where the city sleeps
And I’m the only one and I walk alone

(Metrolyrics)

For the entire rest of my time in Philadelphia, I thought of that little stretch of west Philadelphia as the “boulevard of ex-boyfriends.”

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Image credit: http://cchcamilo.blogspot.com/2010/05/boulevard-of-broken-dreams.html