Top 100 - Be Mine, Robyn # 7

Story by Anon

I love this song. In fact I love this whole album. I listened to the album a lot for basically my entire HSC year. The album and song have a certain amount of specialness on that basis alone, Year 12 is a good year. 

But that's not the end. There's a girl (there's always a girl, isn't there?). 

This girl was pretty special. We went to primary school together, I guess I had a little crush on her even then. We were friends in primary school, for as much as that means. But things happen. I hadn't seen her between Year 6 and Year 11 and then happened to stumble upon her at the end of Year 11 at a train station. 

I was getting on the train back to school, she was picking a friend up from the station. She'd just been named School Captain, I was on my way back to be be named prefect (a rank lower than school captain, but my school was better so let's call it even).I was wearing a uniform with blazer, she was wearing a flowery dress. I was pretty excited to be honest. We chatted. It was nice.

For some reason it didn't occur to us to swap phone numbers. Like six months later or thereabouts we 'friended' on Bebo.  Then we reconnected in earnest. Chatting heaps, texting, whatever it is that teens do on their various forms of social media.

We then met up in the last holidays of Year 12. Our first meeting was at some temporary ice skating ring (why it was there I will never know). It was rad.  We hung out heaps, cruising around as 18 year olds do. Went to gigs, parties etc. 

Went back to school for the final bit. Then, post HSC, we spent a lot of time together. Almost everyday we'd be hanging out. We'd be out 4 or 5 nights a week. We played pool regularly during the day, there were a lot of parties on. I don't know exactly what we did, but there was a lot of it. Yeah we were pretty tight there for a while.

I guess I played the role of 'best male friend who wishes it was more than that' to cliched perfection. I could never work out if she was 'interested' in me or not. And I really did find her friendship to be very important and didn't want to fuck anything up.

She drove five hours with me to go to a New Year's / 21st party in Wellington. We hooked up that night. In that most innocent of ways - we kissed. 

She was moving to Melbourne like one week later, I was also moving a couple of weeks later. Nothing eventuated. We never even talked about it again.We kept in contact for a while after moving. Initially a lot. When I realised that Robyn was coming to Australia I was crazy excited. We went to the gig together in Melbourne.

This is where the song comes back in.

It was a pretty small venue, absolutely packed, with my then favourite artist playing, hangin'  with one of my favourite people. So that was a pretty good moment. But at this point I'd pretty much come to terms with 'us' as not going to happen. And Robyn played Be Mine. I loved this song.

I'm not one who listens to lyrics that closely, so having reviewed them prior to writing this it seems I was probably desperately clinging to any sense of relevancy, but if you extract just a few lines, as 18 year old me did in his mind, it certainly seemed pertinent:

Just a sweet pain of watching your back as you walk away / As I'm watching you walk away...There's a moment to seize every time that we meet / But you always keep passing me by / But you never were and you never will Be Mine.

When I hear this song I still think about her a bit. Not a vivid specific memory. More conceptual.


Artwork by Karin