Do you believe in life after love?

Why yes, Cher, I do.

On the bus this morning this song came up in my iPOD. Okay, that's not exactly true. I was listening to Snow Patrol and decided I needed something a little more upbeat to start my Friday with. So I chose Cher, the album Believe, from 1999.

"Believe" is one of those songs that immediately takes me back. I remember the first time I heard it. I was in La Jolla, driving around with A and J in A's Land Cruiser. This was a big deal because we were a year out of college and no one else I knew had a Land Cruiser. And this was a sweet ride man. We took it camping once and J tried it off road, we almost got in over our heads. A and S and I had to get out of the car to watch J maneuver it out of the spot he'd gotten it stuck in. But I digress... when I first heard this song I was in the back seat of the Land Cruiser, coming home from shopping, probably at UTC, but more likely that fancier mall out on 8, I can't remember. This song came on and I just remember being flabbergasted that it was Cher and thinking that the effects they had engineered on her voice were really strange. I had the same thought as I did when wedge shoes came back in style earlier this year, "Yuck. That is a trend I will never get on board with." Well, I've stayed away from the wedge shoes, but it's harder to stay away from the engineered voice thing in pop music.

The other people this song makes me think of are M and J, neither of whom I talk to anymore. J (not the J from the Land Cruiser) was my boyfriend after college, and I met him through M, a girlfriend that I had rowed with and with whom I'd been pretty close up until the last couple of years. When this song came out J and I had just met and were starting to date. He was a vet, in a fellowship doing emergency medicine at the hospital where M was a technician. So they worked crazy hours. I remember once the 3 of us went to brunch down in PB and J was so tired that he put salt in his coffee instead of sugar. I remember thinking how cute that was. Yeah, I don't know why. I also remember M telling me about the late nights that they had at the hospital and that when "Believe" would come on the radio, J would dance around singing it. At the time I loved that about him. Shortly after this song came out, J and I both moved back up to the Bay Area, followed shortly thereafter by M, who, as far as I know, still works with J. I haven't talked to J since our last fight, on the steps of his cousin's house in Putney, a suburb of London, on an ill-advised (when will I start to listen to the people around me?) trip to see his family (after we were already broken up) before I moved to Atlanta. Good times. I think he's married now. I wonder if when he hears this song, it makes him think of his fellowship in San Diego?

Thinking of all these people, of this time in my life, and where I am now - the song fills me with optimism. There IS life after love, no matter how heartbreaking a break-up is, or how immediately a friendship can just seem to be over. Life goes on and gets filled with new love.

Wow. All that from a Cher song? Thank god it's Friday, my brain is obviously in need of a break.