My parents divorced right when I turned nine, and my father spent that entire summer listening to Dire Straits and Steve Winwood. My most vivid memory of that time is of an evening when my mom dropped my little brother and me off at our dad’s for the weekend— there was dad, standing outside in a lightweight turquoise sweater and grey snakeskin boots, beaming in front of his newly-purchased, oddly-colored, brownish-orangey Buick Regal. Immediately my brother and I jumped in and dad took us out for ice cream, blaring “Money For Nothin’” the entire time. At a time when I was scared and sad about my parents breaking up, that memory sneaks through as a moment when things were okay and I knew that we were all going to make it.

Needless to say, I harbored a deep love for Dire Straits from that point forward. It was something my dad and I shared, and by the time I moved in with him when I was 13, still a regular feature on the tape deck. I’d been getting into some trouble with friends and with boys while living with my mom in Auburn. My dad lived in a small town called Wales, and they both agreed that a move from the city to the country would be good for me. For those unfamiliar with the particulars of Maine geography, Auburn is a “city” of approximately 20,000 people. Wales had a population of maybe 1,000 people back then—no police department, no post office. Such a move, they decided, would surely protect me from the criminal element.

I was miserable. I was bored. There was not a single store where I could buy or steal cigarettes. I spent hours on the front deck, watching cows chew cud as watered-down manure slopped from the top of the fertilizer tank that loitered lazily around the field, just beyond the rock wall bordering our twenty-four acres. My stepmother ran a beauty salon from our house, so word soon got out to the twenty kids in my upcoming eighth grade class that a girl from the city had just blown in. When I stepped onto the playground I already had adoring fans. This was a stroke of luck for me, because as soon as hunting season opened my father and stepmother insisted that I wear a blaze-orange vest on my daily walk to school. Any other kid would have been massacred, but my city status meant I was cool enough to withstand even that mortification.

I saw Robert my very first morning at school. Maroon paisley-printed button down, perfectly stonewashed jeans. He was beautiful. Dark and handsome. I caught sight of him just as he nailed a flawlessly executed overhand toss of a lucky basketball swoosh through the net. Love.

Within a few months we were inseparable. He was almost fifteen (he had stayed back, but who cared?). I became best friends with his sister, camped with his family in the summer, went snowmobiling in the winter, bought him silk boxers for Valentine’s Day. We were prom king and queen, no small feat even in a class of eight boys and twelve girls. In our eighth grade yearbook, Robert wrote that his Future Plans were to “be with Shell and buy her flowers everyday.” He let me wear his Starter jacket. Everyone was crazy jealous of me. We were constantly in the principal’s office for PDA. We had SEX. A lot.

Of course, as with any young love relationship, we also made each other mix tapes. While our official “song” was “Nights in White Satin,” what stays with me from all those mixes was Robert’s inclusion of “Brothers in Arms,” by Dire Straits, at the very end of one of the tapes. Never mind that the song has absolutely NOTHING to do with love. It is a song, fer god’s sake, about war. But oh, my heart swooned to hear that song. So momentous. So tortured. Christ, so full of feeling. Clearly evidence of his superior soul-maturity.

But all was not destined to last in the love-of-a-lifetime relationship of Michelle and Robert. Though we managed to stay together for eight months, three weeks and two days, we broke up one teary and star-filled August night, right before beginning high school, on the playground of the Beaver Brook campground in Monmouth, Maine. It was for the best. I had ambitions. I was going places. He would be perfectly happy to inherit the family golf cart/snowmobile business and live in Wales forever. Of course, as soon as we started school a few weeks later and Robert became an object of absolute adoration for every girl with a pair of eyes, I was jealous and bereft beyond belief. I wanted him back, but he had gotten a taste of the wide variety of girls at his disposal.

Over the next several years, Robert and I would occasionally hook up whenever one of us wasn’t seeing (and sometimes while we were seeing) other people. I always wanted him to commit—he never would. Finally, one stormy winter night during my junior year (Robert’s sophomore year, he’d stayed back again), I told him once and for all that if he loved me, he’d have to prove it some other way than by having sex with me. He drove me home in silence except for the Rolling Stones’ “Outta Tears” blasting from the speakers of his pickup.

I am still in possession of half a dozen journals filled with lost-love poems about Robert. He still lives in Wales and now has four kids, although his dad sold the family business. Our relationship featured dozens of songs. But the one I can’t listen to is “Brothers in Arms.” Maybe it has something to do with the lines: “There’s so many different worlds / So many different suns / And we have just one world / But we live in different ones.” Alas, my dear Robert, we were from different worlds—just a city girl and a country boy on the battlefield of love. When my father died four years ago, Dire Straits were out for good. Not exactly Freudian, but it was a war of the heart, baby, and I lost.