I started this day, like I do most days, eating peanut butter toast and thinking about what songs I wanted to listen to while I read the newspaper. Piano? Bach’s cello suites? EDM? Since God works in mysterious ways I can’t say exactly how this idea popped into my head, but after a moment of browsing I searched for K-Ci & JoJo’s “All My Life.” And lo, it was the perfect morning song.

Instantly I was transported to the gym at Carl Sandburg Junior High in Rolling Meadows, Illinois. The DJ (a hip teacher? who DJs junior high dance parties?) played this song, and as I heard its soft opening strains, students parted like the Red Sea before Moses and across the dull linoleum floors strode Lenny Jagla. He was coming toward me. His blond bowl cut shone like the sun itself, and I smoothed my hands down my mint green dress. Lenny had told me in home economics that my class picture was cute, so I knew why he was coming. We were going to dance. All his life, he’d prayed for someone like me. And there I was. It was the perfect dance on the last night we would ever see each other, since we were going to different high schools, cross-town rivals. Ours was a forbidden romance, and although it only lasted one night, I always think of Lenny when I hear this song.

Two years later, I slow-danced with a boy named Tug at a student leadership conference. It was another K-Ci & JoJo song, “Crazy,” which was about a sung from the point of view of a man who had done something wrong (what was it?!) and was apologizing to his girlfriend, asking her to come back because he was going “Crazy crazy crazy just thinking about you lately.” Tug didn’t have anything to apologize for, but he sang the song anyways. He wore a gray baseball cap from beneath which tufts of hair sprouted. We took one picture together, with some of our fellow student leaders, and I still have it somewhere.

The year before that, one of the most popular songs was Aaliyah’s “Are You That Somebody.” I think it was on the Dr. Doolittle soundtrack, but my most vivid memory of it was when it came on during our bus ride home. Adam Lenkowski, who lived in the green house in the cul-de-sac next to ours, kept making the baby coo sound over the song, and I got mad at him because, until then, I had thought he was cute but I was angry that he wasn’t letting the rest of the bus enjoy the song. I never danced with anyone to this song–in junior high, I don’t think I would have known how to–but I remember being impressed in high school when I saw a girl from the dance team perform a solo to it during the school talent show.

1999 saw the release of “No Scrubs” and “Baby One More Time,” two of the greatest songs ever to have been written and recorded. But it was Ricky Martin’s “She’s All I Ever Had” that made the best slow dance – how can you not fall in love to lyrics like, “She’s my lover/she’s my friend?” This was played at another junior high dance, and I danced with Jim Williams. I never had a crush on Jim, but he had just broken up with my friend Jenna, and I kept looking at her to see if she was angry. I don’t think she was. He kept his hands on the back of my hips and put about a foot in between us, but it didn’t really matter. I mean, have you heard the sitar in that song? For three minutes, I was in love.

The following year I went to homecoming with a boy named Bill who, come to think of it, was the first man I ever trolled. He was in my biology class and bragged a lot about how wealthy his parents were, including, I kid you not, talking about his Tag Heuer watch. Those things are like $1500, and I don’t know what a 14 year-old kid in suburban Illinois was doing with it. We were dissecting pigs in our classroom when he asked me to go with him, but I decided in the back of his dad’s Buick that I didn’t like him. (His dad was in the car! Just driving us to dinner.) He never complimented my outfit, and when he put his hand on the small of my back to guide me into the restaurant where his friends were sitting, I got a shiver–not the good kind. I ordered everything on the menu that looked appealing to me, and a few other items to boot. All the other girls sat picking at their salads while I dug into pasta, chicken, several sides, and two desserts–chocolate cake and apple crisp. We danced to “This I Promise You” later in the night. I was so full I could hardly stand up.

My favorite song of 2002 was the Ja Rule/Ashanti duet “I’m Real,” but that never got a lot of high school dance-floor play. That summer, I went with a couple of friends to a John Mayer concert in Milwaukee (the Chicago concert having already sold out), and I fainted in the GA area because it was too dang hot, but before that, my friend Josiah pulled out his brand-new Palm Pilot in the car. “Guys! Want to hear my new favorite song?” We were so impressed by this pocket-sized phone AND MP3 player that we couldn’t say no, and he started playing Vanessa Carlton’s “A Thousand Miles” somewhere just north of the Wisconsin border. I loved it. When Josiah and I went to a dance together later that year, we looked at each other with huge grins when this song came on, then promptly realized it is impossible to dance to.

2003 was probably the best year of all time for pop music. “Crazy in Love” was released, as was the Avril Lavigne song “Damn Cold Night,” which some of my annoying friends sang as “damp cold night” so that they wouldn’t have to swear. It was the year of “In Da Club,” “Work It,” “Ignition (Remix),” Justin Timberlake’s solo career, and the B2K song “Bump, Bump, Bump.” What 1939 was to movies, 2003 was to dance hits. My favorite slow dance that year was with a cute college boy who I met in the fall, though, to the Daniel Bedingfield song “If You’re Not the One.” He asks some really great questions, like, “If you’re not the one, then why does my soul feel glad today?” This gym was an upgrade from high school and junior high, bigger and darker and more full of promise. Life would only get stranger and more complicated from that moment, so I took solace in Daniel Bedingfield’s words:

“I don’t know why you’re so far away
But I know that this much is true
We’ll make it through”