how could i ever forget.

one of the strangest, and possibly most disconcerting sensations in life is when you relate an unforgettable memory you have of someone to said person, and they don't remember it at all.

lemme explain.

on our last night in russia this past july, pops and i were catching a train from st petersburg back to moscow at midnight (we had a sleeping car; it was cool). pretty taxed from a week of running around the two cities, we spent much of the final hours before the train sitting in our hotel lobby. there was (and still is, i suppose) a piano bar adjcent to the lobby. that night, a singer was accompanying the pianist; they were doing jazz and pop standards. (my dad obv could name the authors of each jazz song, and the year in which it came out.)

at one pt, the pair began playing i cant make you love me, a classically vh1-90s-pop song which was originally performed by bonnie raitt and bruce hornsby, and which i think is powerfully sad. the slightly broken english, the russian accent of the singer only heightened that effect.

still, my mind was transported back to 1993, when i went with a friend to see bruce hornsby at the erstwhile-named paramount theater at msg. (i liked hornsby, but wasnt a huge fan; my friend had barely heard of him. we had somehow been given the tickets by a third party. i cant remember the details; it involved one of our parents' businesses.)

my friend was in the middle of a long, tempestuous, and ultimately doomed relationship with a guy she was very much in love with. it wouldnt end until years later, but i divined that she already knew it was never going to be what she wanted it to be.

this was driven home when hornsby played i cant make you love me (one of the singers in his band filled in for raitt). the chorus of the song is simple:

i cant make you love me if you dont
you cant make your heart feel something it wont

this was one of those times when you cant be certain if you intuited the situation and then confirmed that it was indeed happening, or the other way around - you saw it, and it instantly made so much sense that it felt like you had precognated it.

in the middle of the song, i looked over at my friend, and i saw tears streaming down her face. i knew what she was thinking. i knew who she was thinking of. the music's the thing...

every once in a while i hear that song, but every time i do, i think of my friend that night. that experience no doubt played no small part in making it one of my favorite unrequited love songs of all time. it was something, to hear that song and think of that night in ny, in russia, an ocean away, more than a decade later.

and yet, when i told my friend this story upon my return (i had never previously told her about the association), she had no memory of the original night.

i couldnt believe it. id been periodically thinking of her that night for fifteen years.

anyway, i said this kind of thing was disconcerting, but it's also romantic, when you think about it: the idea that random things you do, that you take for granted even, can mean so much to someone else.