It’s the cheesiest of ‘our song’ beginnings. I was a sixteen-year-old desperate virgin who left a relatively cute and wholesome little cheerleader to hook up with a girl named Kathy, who had a reputation for putting out. Which she did. With the son of the pastor at my parents’ church. This left me without a prom date, something I panicked over, since the event was only eight weeks away.

Believing in the old bird in the hand axiom, I asked Carrie, a girl I had had been friends with for over a year, to go with me. I decided to accept the fact that I might as well be going with a guy friend, for all the lovin’ I’d be getting that night. But during the interim I began dating Meredith, an attractive girl with a body that almost made me cry. Out of frustration, I mean, because she wouldn’t even let me kiss her with tongue. Still, the lure of the potential had me seeing her on a regular basis in the days leading up to the big night. I even took her out to dinner the night before prom to assure her that Carrie and I were just friends, so she had nothing to worry about.

Except for the fact that Carrie and I ended up in bed together naked on prom night, losing in one fell swoop our virginity, my relationship with Meredith, and our tenuous grip on just being friends. Earlier in the evening, at the prom, we had danced together to the theme song -”Wonderful Tonight,” by Eric Clapton. For the first time, I had seen something different in her eyes and felt something new pounding in my chest (and something familiar pounding in my pants.) That became our song and, for the four years Carrie and I were together, it was an aural symbol of our beginning and our shared lives.

Not two hours after she ended our relationship, I got in my car. When the radio came on, it was playing “Wonderful Tonight.” I nearly lost my shit, and I vowed to never listen to that song again. Years later, even after my musical snobbery had grown by leaps and bounds and I had added “Wonderful Tonight” to the thousands of songs I looked down upon, I still didn’t go out of my way to listen to it. But when I heard parts of it, the notes brought back good, warm, All-American nostalgic feelings, like looking at pictures of myself being held by younger-looking versions of my parents.

Carrie and I got back in touch after a few years and somehow the awkwardness was gone, replaced by the respect and shared memories of two people who helped each other navigate the treacherous years between sixteen and twenty. My first date with my wife was at Carrie’s wedding: we had all stayed in touch in a casual but genuinely caring way. Then last year, five days before Christmas, a girl I had gone to high school with and had not seen for years showed up at my door, out of the blue. A car carrying Carrie and her brother Ben had crossed the median on I-77 and was hit by a truck, killing them both instantly.

As I watched Carrie’s father lean over, praying aloud with his right hand on Ben’s coffin and his left on Carrie’s, my heart broke all over again. Incongruously, I heard that guitar lick from “Wonderful Tonight” in my head. I have not heard the song since and I cannot imagine any situation in which I would subject myself to it.