30 days of song: day 8

A song I know all the words to: "Total Eclipse of the Heart" by Bonnie Tyler

And if you'll only hold me tight
We'll be holding on forever
And we'll only be making it right
Cause we'll never be wrong together
We can take it to the end of the line

What's the next line? My sophomore roommate, Debbie, was completely in love with this song. Had several mix tapes with this involved. There was a CD, not a Bonnie Tyler, but some sort of Best of 1983 or some nonsense. Debbie and I would have been 8 or 9 when this song was released. Turn around bright eyes. Have you ever seen the video? The height of surreal music video production.

Debbie and Traci (our suitemate--we shared a bathroom) would argue about the next lines of this garbled song. She was convinced it was "love is like a shadow of the ultimate kind." Traci, also wrongly, thought it was "love is like a shadow of your darkest side." None of this made sense, but little of that song did, frankly. The real lyric is "your love is like a shadow on me all of the time." They both thought their own version waw right--at least they continued a theme of some kind. Fit grammatically.

But then she sings, "I don't know what to do, I'm always in the dark..." and the next line had confounded Debbie, Traci, Dez, Mary, Katy--all the sophomore girls. I wasn't really a part of their clique--I never really quite fit in larger tight groups too well--and they were in our room one night pretending to kareoke to this song. When Debbie sang "I don't know what to do, I'm always in the dark" she then sort of hummed through the next part. When the song was over, Katy asked her why she didn't sing that line, since she belted out the rest of it.

"Well, can you tell me what she's singing?" Debbie threw it back to Katy.

From up in the loft where I was reading, amused, I said quietly in the moment's pause, "We're living in a powder keg and giving off sparks."

Debbie never forgave me for not telling her this the moment we'd met.