Just For This Moment

***Published ex post facto on 16 Oct 2010***

While driving home alone from Christmas festivities, the music I was listening to wasn't keeping me awake enough, so I needed some music which was a little more...engaging. Thinking of music I couldn't help but sing along with, I decided to pop in Wicked. Yes, this did the trick. How could I NOT bust it out a little with Dancing Through Life and Defying Gravity? Seriously.

But one song stood out to me more than ever before. Suddenly, I realized how much I identified with it, and I listened to it twice just to catch it all and marvel at my newfound understanding of the emotion behind the lyrics which had made some sense to me before but which now sounded like an echoing memory from my own heart and mind. Oh, precious.

In this scene, the heady, logical, introverted loner, Elphaba (the "wicked witch"), finds herself in a romantic situation with the sexy and fun-loving Fiyero, the guy all the girls want but who Elphaba, despite her suppressed attraction, had decided would never choose someone like her. He was the hedonistic "player" but was now exploring this new world Elphaba inspired him to see, in which simply going along with pop culture and "dancing through life" was revealed as a copout and a relatively meaningless way to live, compared with trying to change the world and living by your own convictions without regard to society's imposed pressures. So that's a bit of background, as I see it, for those of you not familiar with the musical.

As I listened to the lyrics, I realized I identified in many ways, and it was interesting to think that I had been quite so in the moment, in a way. I'm generally one who thinks a lot about future consequences and how actions will affect others and myself. But in one particular relationship, I experimented, in a way, because of who and how he was and how that drew me in.

I found myself thinking, "But what about the fact that we can't possibly turn this into a romantic relationship...ah forget it, just for now, I'm here and in this moment, and for now, I'm going to enjoy feeling this close with someone again and enjoy the ride (without letting it get too out of hand). Come what may, I want to see what it's like to let go a bit and just enjoy this while it lasts."

Call it part "gay adolescence", part attempt at another approach or perspective, part marveling a bit that this kind of guy really could be attracted to someone like me, part genuine affection in a friendship-turned-fling. I felt a genuine connection and affection with him, but I also let my teenage girl traits overpower common sense.

The outcomes of my own relationship and the one in the musical are very different, but I nevertheless identify more with the lyrics now than I thought possible, and it weirded me out a little to think that I had "been there":


---------------------------------------
ACT TWO, Scene 4: A clearing in the Great Gillikin Forest. Night. A campfire.

Elphaba and Fiyero are alone at last...

[ELPHABA]
Kiss me too fiercely
Hold me too tight
I need help believing
You're with me tonight
My wildest dreamings
Could not foresee
Lying beside you
With you wanting me

Just for this moment
As long as you're mine
I've lost all resistance
And crossed some borderline
And if it turns out
It's over too fast
I'll make every last moment last
As long as you're mine...


[FIYERO]
Maybe I'm brainless
Maybe I'm wise
But you've got me seeing
Through different eyes
Somehow I've fallen
Under your spell
And somehow I'm feeling
It's "up" that I fell


[BOTH]
Every moment
As long as you're mine
I'll wake up my body
And make up for lost time


[FIYERO]
Say there's no future
For us as a pair


[BOTH]
And though I may know
I don't care
Just for this moment
As long as you're mine
Come be how you want to
And see how bright we shine
Borrow the moonlight
Until it is through
And know I'll be here holding you
As long as you're mine

(Fiyero studies her face.)

[FIYERO]
What is it?

[ELPHABA]
It's just-- for the first time, I feel...wicked.
----------------------------------------


As I listened to the lyrics, I wish I could have seen my own expression. It was probably a curiously amusing combination of nostalgia, longing, self-bemusement, realization, and the sort of amused expression of a parent whose child has just done something foolish but entirely understandable.

Never before had I experienced quite the degree of abandon as I did in this brief fling which came to mind while listening to this song. I'm not usually one to experience things for the sake of experiencing them. I've usually been mindful of the future, including whether a relationship had a future, and if it didn't, I'd not invest in it much, at least not in certain ways. But I tried doing things a little differently that time.

Yet, after all is said and done, and romantic attachments with the other party in this "fling" are dissolved and I don't want to "go back", and even though I can look back and see that the relationship was a bit immature and hormone-based, something about that kind of a connection leaves me wishing, longing to experience it again.

And even though I can think of relationships with greater depth, better communication, more history and commitment, and a deeper "connection", there's something about the romantic connection that brought part of me alive, that made me feel complete and activated in really positive-feeling ways, and so even though this particular "fling" was a fleeting and relatively shallow thing, I'm left longing for a relationship which includes that chemistry, that vibrance, that feeling like all is well in the world while you're with that person, that sense of total and exhilarating intimacy and trust, as illogical as it may be, fade though it may, along with the "deeper" things. I realize the energizing happiness I've felt with a couple friends-turned-romantic is theoretically unimportant in a "real" relationship, but it still feels so beautiful, so enlivening, so motivating that while feeling it, I have to believe I can feel it along with, or on the way to, the abiding, lifetime committing kind of love, too.