I suppose the best place to start is in the beginning: My mother was a crazy 80’s rocker girl and I was her inevitable 80’s baby. By the time I was two years old, just by hearing a Def Leppard song on the radio I could answer whether the drummer still had two arms or had already lost one when the song was made and released. (Sadly, this ability has dissipated in my older years.)

Because of my mother I am still very keen on 80’s music, particularly Def Leppard, so it was no surprise when I fell for an oddball guitarist who just happened to be an 80’s fanatic. To test his skills on the instrument he would have me throw out random songs for him to learn how to play. They were all songs I considered to be my favorites, and all of them were songs he could master in a day and play for me upon request any time after that. A few that stand out were “In The Middle” by Jimmy Eats World, “Swing, Swing” by The All American Rejects, and “Bringing On The Heartbreak” by Def Leppard, which is my favorite song of all time. That one he learned on his own, to surprise me by playing it when I came to visit him. Needless to say, my heart swelled two sizes.

To avoid the gruesome details of my failed first attempt at love after that magical moment, I’ll just say that things went sour after that, including his extra-relationship activities with a side of lies, deceit, and control. In an attempt to “let me know how he was feeling” about the events of our troubled relationship, he made me a mix CD and gave it to me, saying, “Listen to this when you are by yourself. This is just what I am feeling inside.” I should have known from the first song that I did NOT want to listen to this mix. I popped it in my CD player, preparing myself for the waterworks that would undoubtedly come once I began listening to the sad songs about lost love that would be on the disc – but that was not what I heard when track one started to play. The CD was filled with songs like “My Happy Ending” by Avril Lavigne and the song by 3 Days Grace with the famous line “I hate everything about you. Why do I love you?” Not exactly what I expected, but that isn’t even the worst part. I’ll let you take a few seconds to guess what the closing song on the CD was. That’s right, “Bringing On The Heartbreak” by Def Leppard.

We’ve been apart for several years now, and these days I don’t even give a second thought to the cheating, lies, and other events that went on between us. But I just cannot find it in myself to forgive him for that mix. “Bringing on the Heartbreak” is still my favorite song and always will be, but it never fails that every time I hear it the first image in my mind is him standing in his bedroom and me sitting on his bed, hearing the first few notes and realizing what he had learned to play for me. And then this image is replaced by all the anger I associate with the moment he handed me that CD. It always takes me a minute to put these things behind me, again, so I can enjoy the song.