Jody’s Girl
by Michaela Falls
MFalls@etexcorp.com
I was riding on the back of his motorcycle, clinging to him like he was my last chance, when I first started humming the lyrics.. I was just out of college and he was my first serious boyfriend and things were falling into place. I was as terrified of going around those curves as I was of the song that crept in my head, humming it softly without understanding the dread the lyrics summoned. They were inappropriate. Bob Segar’s Jody was a disappointed woman and in my life song Jody was a content man. It was on that same ride that he first told me he loved me and I echoed the sentiment regardless of how I churned those words like an angry stew over and over again in the cauldron of my mind.
The years slid by as they tend to do when you turn your face away. It was a storybook love I told myself, swatting away doubts like sluggish flies. The love was enough, no matter whether it was the kind that would impale you and hold you hostage or whether it was the easy friendly love that you slid on like an old familiar coat. But old coats tear and wear away and eventually they cannot hide the true fabric underneath. Whenever doubt would slid its fingers to lift the lid of realization, the lyrics would reverberate intermittently until finally the snooze button had been pushed down once too often. My spark would never be as brilliant as the one I wore around my finger, claiming my future in one single greedy snap of the fist. The song was the music that was to accompany the arrival of light at the end of a tunnel of stunted emotions, a light I would turn away from until its brilliance overwhelmed me. “Didn’t he put me on a pedestal, when first we met? Sure was some honeymoon, ain’t it hard to forget.......”.
I work as a Patent Liaison for a
biotech company in Cambridge, MA and occasionally dab in some freelance writing.
I am a lover of both words and music and welcome any opportunity to
combine the two.