Snooze Alarm

I woke up with a start this morning. I pushed myself up to look at the clock: one-thirty in the morning. I had been asleep for less than an hour, and suddenly I was awake again. As my mind struggled to find its waking balance, I noticed that the radio was still on. I have been listening to the radio as I go to sleep lately, and the timer runs for ninety minutes, so this all made sense. Then I identified the song that was playing - it was Dire Straits' "Romeo and Juliet." A song from my past.
I am a firm believer in the notion of private soundtracks. Laurie Anderson has suggested that our lives are like films with really bad editors. We don't know when to cut the boring parts out. The same can be said for the music that follows us around the planet. I have long held the belief that there are radio elves in charge of inserting just the right song at just the right moments. The advent of mp3 players have allowed us all to program the music that accompanies us on our wandering paths through life. I like that about my Archos Jukebox with its kerjillion song memory - all of which I know and love. Still there's nothing better than the serendipitous appearance of just the right song at just the right moment.
"Romeo and Juliet" is a song that will always take me back to the last breaths of my first big romance. We remained friends, and I carried a torch for her all the way to her wedding. I went primarily to show what a classy guy I could be. I drank a lot. I didn't make a scene (rare for me, actually). When they piled me into the back seat to take me back to the apartment where we were staying, I heard "that song."
"Juliet when we made love you used to cry
you said I love you like the stars above Ill love you till I die
there's a place for us you know the movie song
when you gonna realize it was just that the time was wrong?"
I cried that night. Then I started to grow up. Just a little at first, then a lot. When I woke up last night I felt my heart ache for an instant, and then it was gone. I got up and went to the bathroom. When I came back and lay down on the bed next to my wife, the radio had turned itself off. I fell back to sleep.