It’s not uncommon for Diane or I to start a sentence only for the other to finish it. After 34 years together, our minds are mostly in sync. Our hearts, too. Yet, as I’ve shared before on this blog, our meeting was very much a fluke. If she’d wandered into the store earlier that day, or on another day, or asked about Genesis or Journey CDs instead of two Nanci Griffith releases…well, our story likely would have short circuited before it began.
Yet, while we do complete the other’s thoughts, we don’t complete the other. Too many people, I think, buy into the notion that the “other half” somehow makes them whole. It makes life a whole lot better, for sure, but a relationship won’t change who you are. That comes strictly from within.
Tulsa-based singer-songwriter Casii Stephan shares a reflection on just that in “Without a Box,” a mesmerizing single from her forthcoming Relationship Status EP. To my ears, it sounds like a lost treasure from the 1970s—a seemingly simple piano-based song that possesses much power. She says, “This song is about realizing that life doesn’t stop and end with our relationship statuses. We don’t need them to define us. As a song, I’ve written out my need to know and control the future. I love to know things. I want to see how the story ends before it starts and in life, you don’t get that. You have to let go and be willing to start over. Life was never meant to be lived in a box.”
The Old Grey Cat 