Unchained Melody by The Righteous Brothers

This song is the first one I ever slow danced with a boy to. It was my 7th grade semi formal dance in the cafeteria of the high school. I was so nervous that my friend Billy (a girl who was way ahead of me when it came to boys) took me out into the deserted hallway to teach me about hand placement and stepping, in from of a wall of lockers. That first dance was glorious and terrifying. I had a crush on that boy through middle and most of high school and while it was never reciprocated, I'll always remember that he was kind about it and became a friend to me. We shared other slow dances over the years but none of them are burned into my brain like this one. I am confident that my mother possess a photo of me, taken right before the dance, but we've been unable to find it for this post. However I didn't feel like I could write about that dance without acknowledging the dress I was wearing at the time. I did find this picture of me in it later that year at a family function. It's not quite the same but I think you can probably understand how special that dress was to me at the time.

                                                       

Then I saw Ghost when I was about 13 and my adolescent heart nearly exploded! This song is forever twisted up with all of my teenage longings and expectations about love, which were pretty much crushed as I got older. When I hear this song, they all come rushing back with images from that movie!

It's a beautiful song, there's nothing that sounds quite like it to me, even now.