"Forever Came Today" by the Supremes

There you were/Standing there as your eyes reached out to me/.../At last, ooo/My forever came today/When you walked into my life/And made my lonely life a paradise.

This is what they're all going for in these songs: a unification of people and the self which transcends time and supersedes conscious, rational thought. Real liberation. They're waiting for the arrival of their real, whole self within the mind to signify the happening of true love. You can only really be loved if you really love yourself. A great summation, by Holland-Dozier-Holland again, of what I've been writing about.

They were the first band I listened to when I left home, age 20, for Washington State, traveling alone in my packed Jeep Cherokee across the country. This was the song that struck a chord. I wanted to escape and found things I never counted on, which I'll write about at the right time. My paradise became more of a lonely life, but it was worth it, only because I'm circling back. And I can still feel this song, probably in more ways than I could in that lonely car where no one else could sit if I wanted them to. I felt like I was out of time, arriving in unknown states where no one knew me and I didn't have to worry much about schedules. It was one of the happiest periods in my life, something I had to do alone even though I long to find someone who will understand how necessary it was. It was also probably the first time I felt the material in these songs as if it was my own; the first time I had an adult running through my head, instead of just seeing sex and relationships as a ground for narcissistic possibility. And I'll never be able to relive it with someone else, so in a sense it may as well be fantasy, which is exactly how these songs play out. Perhaps that's the nature of a rite of passage.