Can't Stop the Dance

I was in the gym yesterday w/the iPod on "Shuffle Songs" and sometimes, I swear, it feels like the iPod is listening to my thoughts. I was working on back. Lat pulldowns. Thinking about my wife and how she's really getting worked by this life we're living, this ever-accelerating race to old age, and how I needed to stop somehow and make her know how much I love her. I was thinking these things just as "Two Hearts" by U2 came on.

I wanted to play the song for her somehow. Wanted her to feel how urgently my love still burned, how I cherished this absurd belief that we would fall together into the vortex of death only to emerge unscathed on the other side. I wanted to send it to her as an MP3. Burn her a CD. Copy the lyrics out by hand and leave them under her plate at dinner. Something to let her know that beneath the tired, cresting-the-hill fellow who trudged through her house, behind that set of masticating dinnertime jaws, somewhere deep within that deteriorating genetic machinery, the same ardent and sleepless young fool with whom she'd once fallen in love was still struggling to make himself understood, still and always undefeated by suffering or time's passage or persistent fear.

I did nothing. I listened to the song and did nothing.