I was never a big picture guy.  The future was never something I planned for, or even really thought much about.  What mattered was what I could see.  If things stayed the same, so be it; if something changed, I’d deal with it.  It wasn’t some cognoscente carpe diem ethos; I was lazy, sort of like The Dude from The Big Lebowski minus the robe and slippers.  I wasn’t happy with my situation but I accepted it; at the very least it was something, and for me something was good enough.  When Liz came into my life I started to feel different.  I didn’t change much of anything in terms of my daily routine, but she made it easier to smile.  If work went bad, oh well; if another day went by where I didn’t write a single sentence, who cared; at the end of the day she’d be there, she’d laugh, and nothing else would matter.  I thought so much about her that I forgot about myself.

One day after work I was checking my email and I saw one from a friend.  He and I had been talking a bit in the preceding weeks about the upcoming fantasy baseball season but this email was different.  “We finished the book,” the email said, “and it’s on sale now!”  I was speechless.  Three years prior I knew that he and my former supervisor had started work on a Stephen King/Peter Straub-esque, each person writing alternating chapters thing, but I’d never heard much about it once I moved to Pennsylvania.  I had always assumed it was something they were just doing for fun.  But now they were finished.  And it was for sale.  And anyone, including myself, could see it online, and buy it, and like any of the other books that were sitting on my bookshelf, read it, and quote it, and love it.  I felt like crap.  When Liz came over that night and saw that I was in a mood she asked me what was wrong.  I showed her the email.  “That’s awesome,” she said.  And I agreed; it was awesome, I was proud, and I was happy for them, which I said in my email response to him.  But looking at the website where I could order the book, it made me at first uneasy, and then outright mad at myself.  That night I couldn’t sleep; I stared off into the ceiling and thought about how big of a failure I was.  It had been seven months since I graduated, and in that time I hadn’t penned anything of substance; save for a few late-night sprawls I hadn’t written anything at all.  And now here were two of my friends, professionals in other fields, and they’d completed a novel.  A freaking novel!

A couple of days later and still feeling dejected I got a page over the intercom at work, “Please pick up a call on line 2.”  Wondering why they hadn’t just transferred the call to the department I was working in I picked up the phone and said hello.  “I need you to send me some writing samples ASAP!  Two or three fiction pieces under a total of five-thousand words would be great.  And I need them by the end of the week.”  All of that without even saying hello meant it could only be one person, a former teacher of mine who, for some reason, saw enough promise in me that almost a year after graduating, she was calling me at work to tell me about writing opportunities for me on campus.  I asked what she needed them for.  “Chuck Palahniuk is coming back to Edinboro for another conference and this time he’s been gracious enough to do a small two-day writing workshop for a few students.  Of course I’ve included you in this.”  I was speechless.  And scared.  I had exactly nothing to offer that I felt confident in.  But she isn’t the sort of person you can say no to without feeling like you’ve just bludgeoned the family dog to death, and the fact that she was seeking me out showed the synopsis of her character; she is a helper pure and simple; a teacher in the true definition of the word.  “Sure,” I said.  “And thank you.”  I hung up the phone and every inch of my body was covered in sweat.

All of a sudden I didn’t have time to wallow in my own self-pity about not having anything on par with a novel’s worth of material to show the world.  Now I had to worry about finding a couple of worthy short samples to show to a best-selling author whose work I very much admired.  Fiction was still pretty much uncharted territory for me; outside of some stuff that I had to write for a Fiction Workshop class all I had were notebooks of bad poetry.  But even most of that stuff from the Fiction Workshop was either unfinished, or nothing more than exercises to get the brain working.  Almost by default the first thing I chose was a short story I’d written that revolved around four people’s journey to get to Woodstock ’99.  I didn’t think it was great, but it showed enough promise to earn an A, and that, coupled with the fact that it fit the criteria was good enough for me.  I used the next couple of days at work to struggle over what else I could include.  I thought about writing another story that revolved around music, and during my shifts I’d sift through the CDs looking for any inspiration.  One of the new releases that week was Sing the Sorrow by AFI, a band I always sort of admired from a distance.  The price of the CD was $5.99 so I bought it in hopes that it would give me that something I was looking for.  For the following couple of nights, when I’d get out of work I’d sit at my computer, Sing The Sorrow playing on my CD player, and I’d write.  I’d get a couple hundred words in and then I’d highlight everything and delete it.  I loved the CD but it wasn’t translating itself into anything of substance.

Saturday of that week Liz had to go to Jamestown, NY to attend a defensive driving class as per part of the deal she cut to lower her speeding ticket to a moving violation.  Not having to work, and not wanting to spend another day sitting by myself, staring at a computer screen, thinking about what I didn’t have to send off in a day’s time, I decided to go along for the ride.  We listened to Sing the Sorrow on the otherwise boring ride through the bowels that are the towns along the New York/Pennsylvania border.  The album was a departure from the AFI that I was used to, far less hardcore/scream-with-me anthem driven than it was a bunch of really polished songs that cohesively sounded, well, cohesive.  Sing the Sorrow was an album that beckoned to be listened to all the way through, and we listened to it on repeat.  Though not quite a concept album it sort of sounded that way; the transitions were seamless, the progression felt so natural that the songs were like puzzle pieces.  Davey Havok broods in the miserable macabre just about better than anyone this side of Robert Smith, and on that car ride, in the days following that phone call leading up to that car ride, I could find solace in a song like “Death of Seasons” with lyrics such as:

“It won’t be all right despite what they say

Just watch the stars tonight as they, as they disappear, disintegrate”

Through my scholastic career I always worked better under pressure.  If I was given an assignment a month in advance I’d try to stay ahead of the game and get it done long before the deadline.  But I could never stay focused long enough to actually do it.  Inevitably, the night before it was due, I’d find myself in a panicked frenzy, alternating between the book I didn’t read, and the page I couldn’t put words down on fast enough.  It probably didn’t help that whatever I ended up turning in received a good grade; it was like giving a drunk just enough to keep them buzzed, and therefore they’d never think they had a problem.  I always escaped unscathed, and though I’d tell myself that next times things would be different, that I wouldn’t wait until the last minute, that I would prepare myself better, as I had done with the previous Chuck Palahniuk conference two years prior, that never seemed to happen.  But this time around I could see the writing on the wall; opportunities such as this didn’t grow on trees, especially now that technically I wasn’t a student anymore, and the only reason I was given this chance in the first place was that somehow, on some day, I got in the good graces of a wonderful woman who wouldn’t give up on me the same way I so easily gave up on myself; I couldn’t keep saying, “Next time” this time I had to do it.  In “The Great Disappointment” Havok sings, “While I waited I was wasting away.”  I was tired of waiting, but I was so inundated, so used to it all just naturally working out in the end that I didn’t know how to break the cycle.

I dropped Liz off at her defensive driving class and had about six hours to kill in Jamestown, NY.  To anyone who has been through there you know that six hours is about five and-a-half hours too much.  But I did my best, driving up and down just about every street within the town limits, parking downtown,  walking past the ghosts of years gone by, seeing nothing but the dilapidated storefronts of businesses long since given up on.  When I was out of viable options I remembered that there was a community college in Jamestown.  Years before I had gone there with my sister to watch her play volleyball , and though I knew it wasn’t much, I figured at least there would be living, breathing people walking around.  But there wasn’t; that week happened to be spring break and the campus, like the town, was a virtual ghost town.  But it was a nice day, unseasonably warm, so I figured I’d walk around anyway.  I grabbed my notebook, a pen, my copy of Palahniuk’s Choke that I’d begun re-reading after my teacher told me about the forthcoming conference, and I headed out.  I walked the entire campus in about ten minutes, but I wasn’t ready to go back yet.  I found the library door unlocked, so I walked upstairs, found an empty classroom, and read.  As is often the case when I read I started to doze off.  However long later when I came to, drool-smeared and dazed, I closed Choke, picked up my pen, opened my notebook, looked around the otherwise empty room, and started writing.  As my right hand worked its way back and forth across the page I didn’t think much about what I was writing, whether or not it was good, I didn’t stop myself to re-read the previous sentence or think about where I was going with the next one; I just wrote.  And then, like Forrest Gump when he says, “I didn’t want to run no more,” just as naturally as I started, I stopped.  I closed my notebook and made my way for the exit.  Just as I was about to head down the stairs I saw an adjacent room with the door slightly ajar.  There was a bright neon pink sign that read, Theft Anonymous, taped to it and I could hear people talking.   Outside the door there was a big comfy looking chair that I took a seat on.  For a while, I don’t even know how long, I listened to the people on the other side of the door tell their stories of how they stole things: televisions, their mother’s pearls, their first girlfriend’s virginity, the sort of things you’d never think about anyone ever stealing, and I listened until I saw that it was time to go pick Liz up.  When she got in her truck I had it on the tip of my tongue to tell her about the stories that I just heard, but I didn’t.  We rolled through another full listen of Sing the Sorrow before she finally asked me what I did with my time.  I remembered the thing I wrote, and I handed her the notebook.  I kept glancing over at her to see if I could tell how far along she was in reading it.  “This is really good,” she finally said as she closed the notebook.  “You should send this to him.”  So I did.

When the first day of the workshop finally arrived I had worried so much about coming up with some topic to do a presentation on—something my former teacher threw at me just days before—that I had forgotten altogether about the works I’d sent off to be critiqued.  I didn’t even think much about what I wrote as Palahniuk started off by going through a bunch of techniques that worked for him, which ended up taking up the majority of that first day.  It wasn’t until the start of the second day when he said that he was going to have one-on-one meetings with everyone to talk about their works they’d submitted to him that I got really nervous.  When it was my turn with him I felt like I was heading off to be judged for the most heinous sins against humanity; there wasn’t going to be a trial or anything, I was going straight to the firing squad.  When he handed me the stapled papers with my name at the top of it I could see there was something handwritten in the top right corner.  Immediately I thought of A Christmas Story when Ralphie receives the paper which he thought would warrant a costumed parade of accolades, but instead had, “You’ll shoot your eye out!” as bold as the sky is blue written across the top of it.  Not that I thought what I handed in would warrant any applause; in fact I thought just the opposite, that if anything, since I once again waited until the last minute, I would get what I deserve, a lifetime-in-the-making mark of “You’ve now shot both your eyes out.  Congratulations!”  But it didn’t say that at all, and Palahniuk didn’t have anything but praise and some suggestions of using what we’d learned in class to make things “tighter” to say about my writing.  “You’ve got a lot of talent,” he said, “and that you can’t teach.  Everything else you can work on if you’re dedicated enough.”  I thanked him and moved on.  I wasn’t exactly on the proverbial Cloud Nine but I was somewhere in the galaxy; it was one thing for girlfriends, and friends, and parents, and teachers, and even colleagues to say that your writing is good, but it was something completely different for someone who wrote a book, Choke, that I’d loved so much, to say those things.  People use the word inspiring all of the time to describe a lot of varying emotions, but the feeling I had walking back to my seat felt to be at the root of the very word.  This was the sort of kick in the ass that I needed to finally say, “This time things are going to be different” and actually mean it.

For the four days that followed (chronicled with a master’s touch in the documentary Postcards From The Future by The Cult fan site founder Dennis Widmyer) the entire experience was one big inspiration.  Groups of strangers were there to talk about their love of Palahniuk’s work, and that happened, but more than that, including the duration of what was supposed to be my presentation, people talked about what made them tick: traveling, photography, tattoos, orgies, writing, late-night benders, whatever you can imagine.  One day, as I was driving Palahniuk to one of the events, we got to talking about some of these stories, and the people behind the stories—because Edinboro is so small, and each reading so intimate, before the end of the week, it was easy to say, “that guy with the tattoo sleeves” and even if you didn’t know his name was Chris, everyone, including Chuck, would know exactly who you meant—and I sort of turned the talk back to the workshop.  I was talking about a friend of mine from the Fiction Workshop class who was also there during the first day of Palahniuk’s workshop but couldn’t make it the second day, and I was saying how he and I had talked the previous night about putting a workshop together.  “Don’t talk about it,” he said, “just do it.  Even if it’s just the two of you, do it.”  He’d gone on a lot during the first two days about the importance of the process within a writing workshop, but it didn’t really hit home until that car ride.  “We plan on it,” I told him, “a few of us from the workshop are really going to do it,” and that was the truth; a few days after the festivities, a bunch of us met up at the local coffee house and laid out a plan for a weekly, blog-based workshop.  That first week, four of us each posted something we maybe wanted to see if it would be worth fleshing out.  I chose to post that same story that I wrote in that Jamestown Community College classroom, the same one that I’d turned into Palahniuk.  In our one-on-one talk he said, “You could have something here.”  I liked the sound of that.  I had no idea what that something could be, but there was a certain confidence that came with the unknown, especially considering there were going to be a few friends who were on the same journey with me.  I had Sing the Sorrow for a soundtrack, a coffee cup full of pens at my disposal, and I planned on using them for what they worth.  It wasn’t a matter of my own self worth anymore; if I wanted to find value in that I had to earn it.  And now was my chance.

I was in one of those bloated rubber Sumo suits the first time I saw her.  There were dozens of people watching my roommate and I make fools of ourselves as we bashed into each other with a reckless abandon, trying our best to fend off laughter long enough to knock each other on their inflated ass.  But once I saw her everything stopped; the periphery surrounding her was like mosaic blur.  Her hair was jet black, her skin pale.  She was wearing torn blue jeans and a black sweater.  She had a lip ring that shined like a sniper’s scope right before they fire and you die.  Her eyes were brown the way the girl behind Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl” must have been.  Gasping for air, wiping the stream of sweat from the rubber pony-tail strapped to my head, for the first time in my life I knew I was in love.

After shedding the suit, from opposite sides of the room we stared at each other in embarrassed intervals, only looking away long enough to try and convince the other that we hadn’t caught the other looking.  She’d whisper things to her three friends who were standing beside her, and I’d lean over and say something to my friends who were standing next to me.  It was an obvious game of attrition, like some sixth-grade dance minus “Bust a Move” and the bowl of fruit punch.  I was waiting for a concrete signal from her to approach, and she was awaiting the same from me.  Both supporting casts of friends were encouraging us to no avail.  When her friends finally tired of her lack of courage, and saw this waiting game for what it was worth—completely futile—they turned to leave.  My friends and I followed just far enough behind to not look like the stalkers we were trying to be.  The January air was a punch-in-the-gut cold, and we followed them until they veered towards the opposite end of the campus from where we were going.  I tried to convince my friends to continue with the detective work but they weren’t having anything of it.  It was too cold, and as one of them pointed out, freezing our asses off even more wouldn’t change the fact that I was being a pussy.

In the ensuing weeks I saw her and her friends all over campus, and each time it was exactly more of the silent same.  I’d try and get a table in the cafeteria close enough to her with the hopes that she’d finally end the stalemate and say hello.  If my friends and I were seated first, she’d do the same.  One of her friends was even in a class of mine, and I sat closer to her than I had before I knew—at least hypothetically speaking—who she was in hopes that she’d give me the scoop on her friend.  But that too was fruitless.  To my friends the girl was referred to as, “the girl from the UC” and almost every day I gave my friends updates; where I saw her, what she was wearing, how I still couldn’t bring myself to talk to her.  Not long after that night I first saw “the girl from the UC”, I started dating a girl that I found enough false courage to talk to.  But it didn’t change the feeling I got whenever “the girl from the UC” crossed my path; I may have been riding shotgun in a Ford, but I had my mind of driving a Ferrari.

That summer, one night when driving back from the campus library, I saw “the girl from the UC” alone, walking across the lawn towards the apartment complex opposite of where I lived.  It was my chance, my silver platter; the sun was just starting to set and the sky looked prophetic; that time of night where one stranger asking another stranger if they wanted a ride would still be seen more of a romantic gesture than a creeper one, and there wasn’t the added pressure of both her and I having a cast of “Just do it” friends pestering us.  I allowed my foot to come off the gas paddle and coasted at a pace I thought would be inviting.  It wasn’t.  She noticed me noticing her and I got scared.  I stepped on the gas and tried not to look back, though I looked back all of the way until she was out of my sight.

Fast forward almost two calendar years to one day, while walking towards the sales floor after punching in, I walked passed “the girl from the UC” in the tight hallway of the backroom of work.  She was halfway through slipping her blue vest over her right arm when we noticed each other.  Both of our eyes ballooned, but we kept walking, perhaps out of fear that proximity might finally force one of us to grow a pair.  When I got to my place behind the counter I kept repeating, “Holy sh!t” over and over to myself until the girl I worked with asked, “What?”  I managed to say, “My dream girl works here,” in stuttered intervals.  It took her to put my stutters together but once she realized what I said she asked, “Who?”  And I couldn’t answer.  In two years of watching from a distance I never got close enough to get her name.  After calming myself down I did a recon mission around the store to try and find out which department she worked in.  When I saw her standing amongst a pile of unfolded clothes, I bee-lined for the backroom and looked over the expanse of the alphabetized work schedule that took up a good chunk of the wall.  I scanned through names, eliminating ones I knew, or ones who didn’t work in her department.  I whittled it down to three potential names, and checked that against who was currently on the clock.  The easiest way to get a concrete confirmation would have been to ask someone that worked with her.  But the place was like a giant high school; if someone knew that you liked someone, everyone knew it, and you could never control either the momentum or what was said by the time it reached its destination.  The wall gave me a name that I was pretty sure was hers.  But I did nothing with it.

One night a bunch of employees were gathering for the nightly team meeting.  I sat down on a bench and planted my head against the wall.  The night meetings were always pointless; self-important managers going over sales figures that nobody in their early-twenties gave a damn about.  One of the elder ladies who worked nights sat beside me on the bench.  Before even saying, “Hello” to me she said, “I know someone that likes you.”  I felt eight-years old again.  In the month or so prior I’d hung out with numerous girls who worked at the store, and a couple of them were interested enough in me to the point where I had to use lies on them to keep them away: “I’m moving soon” or “I really don’t want a relationship right now” were a couple of standbys, and for the most part they worked.  “Aren’t you going to ask me who?” the lady asked.  Without hesitation I said, “No.”  If it was who I thought it was, a girl that my excuses weren’t working on, I really didn’t want to know.  “But she reeeeeeeally likes you,” she said.  “Like reeeeeeeeeally likes you.”  “Ok, who?” I asked, more to get her to shut up.  “Liz,” she answered.  My stomach dropped; I felt like I’d just sped down the monster hill on a roller coaster with nothing securing me.  I bit my lip hard enough to where I could taste the iron of my blood slip down on my tongue.  “Liz?” I asked.  “Yep,” she said.  When she asked, “Do you like her?” I was too dumbstruck to be dishonest.  “The girl from the UC…she’s my dream girl.”

I spent the next couple of days thinking of something to say to Liz.  My entire life I was never much of a talker, and on top of that, I’d never been confused with a smooth talker.  Pretty much every girl that I ever dated, it started off by the girl revealing her interest in me, and for better or worse, me saying some variation of, “Sure” in response.  The biggest reason I hadn’t pursued “the girl from the UC” long before I found out by process of elimination that her name was Liz was because I was afraid of rejection on that colossal of a scale; if she said, “No” to me it would be worse than getting dumped, or fired, or some tangible thing that you’re probably going to be no worse for wear after it happens; it would be the utter annihilation of a dream; and not just any dream, but the sort of dream that when it dies, part of you that can never be reclaimed dies with it: hope.  Two years prior I had come to grips with this rationale and accepted it for what it was, even if that line of thinking happened to by synonymous with stupidity.  It would be easier for me to never know if she liked me than to know that she didn’t.  But now that I had confirmation that she did indeed like me, I was lost.  I had the campus sealed validation of two accredited universities to prove that I had some proficiency with the written word, but when it came to writing something that would reveal my pent-up feelings for Liz, I just couldn’t do it; it felt like trying to learn how to walk for the first time, only I had Weeble-Wobbles for feet.  Finally, after days of pep-talking myself and tearing sheets of half-written letters out of my notebook that just weren’t good/honest/compelling enough, I took the one hundred and thirty-two steps over to where she happened to be standing at work.  As I approached, she turned and walked a few feet the other way before stopping at a rack of jeans.  “Hey,” I said.  “Hey,” she replied.  After seven-hundred-plus days of silent intrigue the ice was broken.  I slipped my way through the sloppy semblance of a conversation before I finally spit out, “Do you want to hang out tonight?”  “Sure,” she said.  “Ok,” I said, and turned to walk away.  When I got about five feet away I stopped, realizing that I’d never introduced myself.  “I know who you are,” she said.  I smiled.  “I’m Liz,” she said to which I answered, “I know who you are too.”

I’ve never won the lottery, but I assume that there’s nothing you can do to prepare yourself for it once it actually happens.  I had about an hour before I got home from work to when she was supposed to come over.  I cleaned my room, did the dishes, and even vacuumed every rug in the house.  When my roommates asked what the hell got into me I told them that “the girl from the UC” was coming over.  They were just as shocked as I was; I finally had grown a pair.  When she finally arrived I made brief introductions and then we went into my room.  She took a seat on the floor while I sat on the bed.  We fumbled our way for a while until the tension was so thick I could see both of us starting to suffocate.  “What do you want to listen to?” I asked.  “Anything works for me.”

I grabbed the first disk I saw, Wiretap Scars by Sparta, and popped it in the CD player.  “This sounds like the guy from At the Drive-In,” she said.  “It is,” I answered, and knew in one instant that my first premonition two years prior was correct; I was in love with this girl.  There’s that scene in High Fidelity where John Cusack’s character Rob is talking about first meeting a girl and he says, “I agreed that what really matters is what you like, not what you are like.  Books, records, films; these things matter. Call me shallow but it’s the fuckin’ truth.”  As far as I was concerned that’s the spot-on gospel.  When dating a girl it’s easy to look beyond something such as she hates to wake up before 7 a.m., or even that she’s a vegetarian when you like to eat meat.  But when you come across someone who thinks Pearl Harbor was a good movie, or thinks that Nickelback a) has musical merit b) is hard rock c) is good, you’re going to have a rough, if not impossible, go at it.  With Liz, right away, I could see I wouldn’t have to deal with that; the mere mention of At the Drive-In was as sexy as anything Victoria’s Secret ever produced.  “Air,” the second song off Sparta’s Wiretap Scars has the line, “What would the oddsmakers say?”   I didn’t know what the oddsmakers would say—until we put on the album I didn’t know what I was going to say—but once the ball got rolling even I couldn’t believe the odds of how similar we were.

We both liked Ani Difranco and Fiona Apple.  We loved John Cusack movies and thought him holding the radio over his head in Say Anything was about the most romantic thing of our generation.  She was an art major that loved to read; I was a writing major who loved art.  We both loved Knorr’s Spanish Rice, hated our job, and liked to fall asleep with the TV on.  I was from Rochester, NY and she grew up just south of there.  When she asked me what my birthday was and I told her, she said, “Shut up!” and demanded my driver’s license.  Wouldn’t you know it; we had the same birthday.

Wiretap Scars was an album I had purchased just a few weeks prior to that night with Liz, and I hadn’t really given it a spin yet.  But immediately I loved it.  Sparta’s debut is more accessible than At the Drive-In’s catalog.  Whether or not that made it better or worse didn’t matter; Sparta was different, and they had a sound that was perfect for two people who had waited two years to have this conversation.  There’s a sense of urgency in Jim Ward’s voice on Wiretap Scars but it’s never overwhelming, and his guitar work is hypnotic, even when it gets chaotic.  But you’re more likely to get lost in the songs than buried in the sound.  Liz and I were enamored with songs such as “Cataract” and “Glasshouse Tarot” right away.  Every time our conversation would approach the natural transition to the next topic we’d relax for a minute and listen.

“Light Burns Clear” opens with the couplet, “Looking back with perfect symmetry/Mistakes were you, mistakes were me” and talking over that line with Liz, we had another starting point to get back to the starting point we both clearly remembered.  I shared my stories of “the girl from the UC” with the Girl from the UC, and she told her tales of “the Turquoise Ring Guy.”  Every instance I mentioned of seeing her, of passing by in my car, or her running by my dorm, she told me what that exact story looked like through her eyes.  For years we were both looking in the same mirror, we both saw the same thing, but we couldn’t stop staring long enough to say something.  Wiretap Scars was helping to push us in that direction.

We didn’t go to sleep that night.  We listened to countless albums in their entirety but every other listen we’d come back to Wiretap Scars and listen again.  After covering a lifetime worth of memories in those first few hours, in a moment of silence while Liz and I were lying beside each other she asked me, “Why didn’t you talk to two years ago?”  I could feel the pain behind her voice, the ramifications of what she was asking.  The first two years in college are another lifetime unto itself where mistakes and misfortunes multiple like sea monkeys.  As I let the question linger I thought of what heartache, and scars, and failed relationships she might be referring to.  Then I thought of myself, my own scars, and how I’d more or less discarded hope the way that people discard chewed gum before that lady said, “I know someone that likes you” to me.  It was on the tip of my tongue to ask her the same question but I didn’t; the song “Collapse,” which has since become one of my ten favorite songs of all-time, said things perfectly:

“The host had his mouth sewn shut

All in the name of trust

When the blood goes thin, he’s given in

You can spare us the formal toast

The drunken anecdotes

From this day on…goes on and on…”

Whoever either one of us, what we did or didn’t do before this conversation, we weren’t going to be able to change that, for better or worse, and if we were going to have the sort of bright future both of us knew from the moment we first locked eyes on each other, we were going to have to look beyond the past, the heartaches and failures, and look only to each other.  Only this time without fear of failure.

A couple months after our first night together we went to see Sparta in Cleveland.  It was the first real concert I’d been to in three years, and it was the first concert I’d been to with a girlfriend where I didn’t have to worry about whether or not they were having a good time or enjoying the music.  We were both there because of the music, because we both loved it.  It only made it better that we both loved each other.  When Sparta played “Collapse” live I looked over at her and she was looking at me; it was one of those scenes, one of those moments that Cameron Crowe invariably turns into an “Awwwww”/Why can’t that happen to me moments in every movie he writes/directs.  For the first time in my life I felt like I had a solid foundation, one which I could build something off of, and I had someone that, no matter what direction I wanted to go in, she’d be along for the ride.

[Writer's Note: I should have given the people within these stories names by now; it would have been easier for both of us.  Starting with this essay there will be names given to the characters important enough to earn the random pulling of them from a baby name book.  Also, when possible, there will be pictures to coincide with the essays.  Why?  Because all of us to a certain degree like picture books.  That's all]

I was sleepwalking through life.  Graduation and the Summer of Me came and went.  As my friends started in on the new semester I was working full-time, stocking CDs and DVDs, describing to blue-haired biddies what a FM Modulator was, and why they needed one if they wanted to upgrade their movie collection without having to upgrade their television.  I don’t know if I was avoiding “the future” but at the very least I wasn’t thinking much about it.  I woke up, I went to work, I came home, downed a MD 20/20, played video games with my roommates, listened to some music, thought about writing, didn’t write, and then went to bed.  The next day I’d wake up and do the same thing over again.  Isolated from a social life that going to classes naturally provides, and even more isolated by the location of our house in relation to where the action happened, aside from the girlfriend of one of my roommates I didn’t have much in the way of interaction with the opposite sex.

From time-to-time one of my ex-girlfriends, Natalie, would come over, we’d have a few drinks, watch a movie, and then she’d leave, go home to her boyfriend, and I’d lie on my bed and stare at the ceiling.  One night we had a party, and one of the girls who showed up was another ex-girlfriend, Vanessa.  Before long we had isolated ourselves from the rest of the people, we got talking about the past, and how our relationship ended.  When we hugged as she left old feelings started to wash over me.  I went in my room and made a mix-CD of a bunch of songs which reminded me of her.  The next night, after spending my entire work day thinking about Vanessa, I sat down at my desk and wrote a sprawling thought that I called The Late Night Confession:

Sometimes, the shadows of life become extremely hard to escape.  These lonely, desolate places take shape in some sort of hypnotic, addictive way and before we know it, we’re stuck like flies to a window on a mid-summer day wanting with all of our ill-willed might to get back outside, away from the captivity that has squandered us for so long.  When little in life goes right it becomes hard to distinguish the things to strive for.  Somewhere on our paths to peace and inner bliss we get sort of sidetracked, a fallen compromise reflecting the dreams that we think inevitably, and matter-of-factly are going to pass us by.  I was in one of those moments—well depending on how long a moment is gauged—until the other day when I saw you smile at me from across the porch.  I knew all at once that I’d remembered you and all your magnificence all along.  Trying to forget you, or get over you was hard.  But it wasn’t as hard as the refrain to jump up out of my seat to hug you, and tell you how much I missed having your eyes to lose myself in, was.  Ok, I’m not as prophetic, or outright, as I’d like to be.  Hell, my attempts always seemed to fall a little shorter than I had intended.  But when you’ve got one foot dragging behind—whatever the reason may be—it’s hard to focus forward, no matter how much you want to.  When you smiled at me, your laugh reminding me of all the things I meant to tell you on rainy nights in July, I can’t believe I let myself, the opportunity to grasp the most obvious feeling that honesty has ever brought to me, slip away.  I wanted redemption in an instant, spread cautiously out over whatever time it might take.  Somewhere in your voice I sensed that our thoughts were walking hand in hand again as they did long before we ever let ourselves admit that we wanted to do the same.  I don’t know why I didn’t tell you the other night everything that I was feeling.  I don’t know, perhaps words like that—or this—would have just gotten in the way, adding pressure, or some unnecessary expectations, to a situation, to a feeling that has always simply and inevitably come naturally.  Images of the yesterdays that I laid awake thinking of you; the countless days that we went without a word betraying our thoughts, or ambitions, to attempt to right the fictitious wrongs, raced in and out of my head during those silent but comfortable moments where we traded short, hopefully unnoticed, glances at each other.  If it would have been a full-fledged game of staring I know I would have lost.  I was always lost somewhere in your being you.  At that moment, and all these moments since I wouldn’t, or didn’t, expect anything different.

A day or so later I gave Vanessa my written confession, along with the CD.  In the days after the party I had allowed my mind to fill in all of the spaces in between the time we were together and the present, and I thought what life would have been like if we hadn’t taken a left-turn on each other a year-and-a-half prior.  The situation, what I was feeling, it seemed organic the way that beginnings—or the rekindling of relationships—do, and it didn’t feel like I was walking down a one-way street.  We traded emails; we talked for hours at night on the phone.  But for everything we were saying to each other what I was waiting to hear never came.  Before long we were back to being strangers.

In the weeks after I spent more time alone in my bedroom, listening to Blood On The Tracks, thinking about the possibilities of winning lotteries I never bought tickets to, watching High Fidelity too many times.  One night after work I was climbing the steps to the living room, ready for another uneventful Wednesday night when my roommate handed me the phone.  I asked who it was, and he said it was, Kara, a friend of mine from Erie, who I had a Fiction writing class with.  When I said, “Hello” into the phone I heard the voice of someone from my long ago past in Rochester.  Molly called me by a nickname that only she, her sister, Charlotte, and a few other old time friends used.  I was in shock; my mind or mouth had no idea what to say.  “Holy shit,” was the best I could come up with, and I said it a few times until the voice on the other end said, “I know.”  Apparently Kara was out at a bar when she overheard a conversation about Rochester.  Admitting her eavesdrop Kara told Molly and Charlotte that she had a friend in Edinboro who was from Rochester.  When the girls asked, Kara told them.  Of the tens of thousands of people in Erie, Pennsylvania, and the million or so in the Greater Rochester, New York region, three girls, one of whom minutes before was a complete stranger, all happened to know the same person: Me.  Disbelief, laughter and a phone call ensued.  An hour or so later, with my roommate and his girlfriend in tow, I met the three of them at the bar.  The first person I saw was Molly, then my friend, Kara, and then the Charlotte.  I was dating Charlotte when I moved to Edinboro and she to Erie, but I always secretly loved her sister Molly.  I hadn’t seen either of them in three years, and Molly was just as stunning as I remembered her; eyes like cut glass, a smile that made that cold October night feel like mid-July.  My knees went cliché on me; I couldn’t take my eyes off of Molly.  So much so that I didn’t see Kara kiss me.  For most of the night I was using her as a sounding board, telling her what my feelings for Molly used to be, how uncomfortable it was to see Charlotte, how much I still apparently cared for Molly.  Kara heard exactly nothing I said, flat out just didn’t care, or was turned on by the competition.  In the back of my mind I always thought Kara had feelings for me, but I never thought too much about them.  With her lips planted against mine I didn’t have a choice anymore.

A couple days later Kara and I laid on my bed and watched High Fidelity.  Nothing physical happened but the tension was thick in the air; ever since she forced her lips on me I thought a lot about her; her assertiveness was a turn-on, and my mind started in on the possibilities.  That night we talked in hypotheticals, off-handed one of us said something about one-day going to New York City together.  A few days later we went.

It had been just over a year since 9/11 but the city was still covered with missing faces, love messages written in crayon by the hands of parentless children, and flower bouquets that had long ago rotted, but nobody had the nerve to remove.  Kara and I stayed in a hotel I’d stayed in many times before, sometimes with other girlfriends.  Since I started staying in hotels I had done that a lot, stay at the same places where I’d stayed with someone else before.  It wasn’t out of spite, or trying to relive memories that had passed me by; it was always a matter of comfort, going with what I knew.  As we checked in I tried to drum up certain memories, certain faces, and it didn’t work.  That made me smile, and for that I found Kara more endearing.  That night we ventured out into the city and for a few hours just took in the sights, the smell of a place both of us loved so much.  We didn’t go too far, choosing instead to save it for the next day.  After we got back to the hotel, we ordered a couple of pizzas, and ate until we couldn’t eat anymore.  With our backs to each other, lying on the same bed, I listened to the silence, tried to gauge if there was the possibility of magic in the air.  She was living with another guy, a guy that she’d been with for years, but she said they were having the sort of problems that don’t get solved.  I thought about that, getting involved with someone who was involved enough with someone to be living with them, and it bothered me.  Not enough to not sleep in the same bed with her, but enough to where I didn’t initiate anything.

The next day we covered a big chunk of the city, from tourist staples, to seedy Canal Street backrooms chock full of knockoff designer purses.  We snuck into the grand ballroom at the Waldorf Astoria, rode the elevators up and down.  Outside of the hotel we met a guy with a dog named Bob.  To complete the self-made Serendipity tour Kara wanted to go to Central Park and see the ice rink where John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale fell in love.  In the park there was a tent set up and a small group of people were gathering to go inside.  We asked one of the security guards what was going on and he said there was a concert, some guy he’d never heard of, but apparently good enough to have a record deal.  Kara and I decided to check it out.  The guy’s name was Howie Day, and neither of us had heard of him either.  But we decided to give it a shot.

We took a seat on the grass of Central Park, and silently felt out our level of interest in one another under the cover of an obtrusive, uninspiring tent.  Using loop pedals, some digital effects, and his guitar, Howie Day made the half-empty room feel full, like a blanket-wrapped embrace in mid-December.  Kara and I kept looking at each other, giving silent validations that indeed we were both in on the secret, in on the moment, that what we were experiencing was, and would probably forever remain, one of those moments, the ones that exist as clichés in movies like Serendipity but never seem to make the jump into anyone’s real life, where time stops, facial expressions freeze their way into your memory, where you fight the cynical urge to blink because you’re sure it can’t really be happening.  But it was happening, and after the first couple of songs I didn’t want to breathe because I didn’t want that moment, or Day’s singing to end.  I was trying my best to write his lyrics into my memory; I wanted to remember everything.  But eventually the last strum of the last song came and I couldn’t remember anything: the names of the songs, the atmospheric rhythm that him patting his guitar gave off, the clever wordplay, what the hell brought us there in the first place.

We filed out into the Manhattan night, high on life and short on words to describe what we both just experienced.  We took turns saying some variation of “Wasn’t that awesome?” to each other as we meandered our way through the Saturday night traffic.  We came across a Virgin Megastore and went in.  I thumbed through the CDs until I came across Howie Day’s Australia.  The album cover was a lot like I felt: the blurred silhouette of a guy looking out on someplace specific to him and the person taking the picture, but a mystery to anyone else trying to find something familiar to root themselves in.  When Kara and I returned to reality, and we tried to describe this night to our closest friends, no matter what we said our words were going to be midgets—even if we used Australia as a backing track—because words always seem to diminish the most important moments in life to anyone on the outside looking in.  We tried our best to stretch that Saturday for all it was worth, fighting through tried feet, and heavy eyes.  I sensed this was going to be our pinnacle; there was nowhere else to go but down, but I tried my best to purge the cynical thoughts that were storming the gates of my heart.  She was going to return to the unhappy life of living with her boyfriend, and I was going to have to go back mine, stocking CDs, and watching John Cusack movies until I was blue in the face.  Love or something like it wasn’t going to be as easy as finding Central Park was; you don’t just ease yourself out of a year’s long relationship into the arms of someone else, no matter how infatuated you are with them, or how much you tell them you want it to happen.  If I wanted the chance at something more with Kara this was the situation I was going to have to deal with.

That following week Australia became my soundtrack.  I listened to “Ghost” as if it were the only song anyone had ever written.

“Lately i’ve been thinking
Lately i’ve been dreaming with you
I’m so resistant to this type of thinking
Oh now it’s shining through

I was alone for the last time
before my nights’ vacation with you
alive from the first now I’m denied
by the ghost of you”

I hadn’t lost Kara—how do you lose something that was never yours to begin with?—but it felt that way, despite our plan to hang out Halloween night.  She made it clear she was going to spend the night, and in not so roundabout terms inferred what would take place between us when she did.  But plans or promises didn’t matter, as concrete as they seemed, I couldn’t shake the situation, her living with her boyfriend, and I didn’t see how us sleeping together would do anything but throw more fuel on a fire I had no power to put out.

As Halloween drew near, I put on my Howie Day blinders, and tried to lose myself in the memory of that night through the songs of Australia.  As I was getting ready to leave work on Halloween, Rachael, a girl that I worked with, walked up and asked if I wanted to hang out for a bit.  For months we’d been talking about doing such, but nothing came of it.  Figuring I had hours before Kara was supposed to show up, I figured what the hell, why not; it was making good on a promise to hang out, an excuse to pre-game, and on a purely vain level, Rachael was hot.  We got a bottle of booze and she followed me back to my house.

It didn’t take long for inhibitions to fall by the wayside, and we found ourselves on the deck discussing people that we worked with.  She was telling me how much she liked the one guy who worked in my department and half-joking/half-serious I asked Rachael why she didn’t like me.  She smiled before leaning in to kiss me.  The next thing I knew someone was shaking my foot.  “What’s up?  Why aren’t you ready?”  Kara was standing above me, in full costume, an overnight bag in her hand.  I had no idea where I was, what I was supposed to be ready for.  “Ok,” I said, and stumbled off to my bedroom to change.  This next time I came to Kara screamed, “Who the hell is that?”  I looked around the room, had no idea what she was talking about.  “Who?” I asked.  “That bitch with the purple hair!” she yelled.  Pants around my ankles, my shirt wrapped around my head, I turned and saw a half-naked Rachael in my bed, passed out, deep asleep, or dead, I didn’t know.  I was in no state of mind to comprehend the situation at hand, beginning with the obvious which was Rachael and I in bed together at different stages of undress.  Whatever I said, it set Kara off into a hysterical rage; if it wasn’t nailed down, she did her best Roger Clemens impression with it.  When the storm calmed—or her arm tired— I tried to follow her out the door, but only got about two feet before I fell to the floor and gave up.  From behind me I heard Rachael ask, “Was that your girlfriend?”  “No,” I answered.  “Does she know that?” she asked.  And the truth was I had no idea how to answer that question.

Kara came back two more times that night and when she’d get there, it became more of the same: Premeditated chaos.  As the haze slowly lifted from my head I started thinking about the totality of our time “together,” from that first night in her car on the last day of Fiction class, to that night at the bar, to our trip to New York City, the Howie Day show, all the way to the present.  Where at first I felt like a complete pile, the more I thought about it, it wasn’t a matter of me being mean, but more the end being justified by an entire case study of mutual means towards each other.  I thought of Day’s song, “Slow Down” and the lyrics:

“An actress
Sooner the better for me
You should know by now
I’m not your friend
You’re raveled up
Just take some time to come undone
You look so tired
I know your type
You storm out
And tear the walls
The portraits down
It’s what you want
It’s how we are”

That was our relationship in a nutshell, but I’d been oblivious to it.  As we sat together on that Central Park grass I’d looked beyond the fact that the first time Kara kissed me I was telling her how much I was still in love with another girl.  I’d looked past the countless times where she’d call me, screaming at her boyfriend, promising—and making good on it—to throw whatever she could find at him.  I completely ignored myself, and how just weeks prior to the beginning of what would become this end with Kara, I was pining over Vanessa, and before her, Natalie.  Apparently it didn’t matter who the girl was, I was more or less shopping when I was hungry; everything looks like the best thing ever; you ignore recalls, and expiration dates, and common sense.  You settle on something because anything has a devious way of looking like everything you ever wanted.  You get hypnotized; captivated by a moment you start thinking that you can turn into forever; infusing qualities into someone as if you’re building a love castle out of broken Popsicle sticks.  In that way pop songs and girls are very similar; you can easily manipulate your tastes for whatever tastes good at the moment.  Who Kara was, at that point in my life she couldn’t be what I wanted.  Howie Day, his music was never going to have a lasting impact on me.  But sometimes, when the moon, the stars, and your hormones align just right, anything can sound like magic.

So during yet another a brief hiatus from the December January Album essays I’m taking a few minutes to list my Favorite Albums from the first decade of the 2000′s.  If you want to get technical, I suppose this is a Best Of list for me, considering I liked these albums the best.  But really, it’s an opinion-based list; I don’t pretend to have listened to enough in the past decade to give an honest, all-encompassing Best Of list that’s 100 albums deep.  This list will reveal that I’m not pretentious enough to put out a list like Spin, not “Indie” enough to be “cool” like Pitchfork, and not mainstream enough to be in the class of Rolling Stone; I’m just a random schmuck from Rochester, NY who loves music enough to take the time to compile a Best Of list of Albums that he loved that were released from January 1st 2000 to December 31st 2009.  Unlike the Album Essays, these ARE the albums I liked listening to the best.  So, to that list, in no particular order:

1. Arcade Fire – Funeral
2. At The Drive-In – Relationship Of Command
3. Eminem – The Marshall Mathers LP
4. Flogging Molly – Swagger
5. Elliot Smith – Figure 8
6. Neil Young – Silver & Gold
7. Ani Difranc0 – Reveling/Reckoning
8. Bob Dylan – Love & Theft
9. The Strokes – Is This It?
10. System Of A Down – Toxicity
11. Aimee Mann – Lost In Space
12. Dredg – El Cielo
13. Flogging Molly – Druken Lullabies
14. Sigur Ros – ( )
15. Sparta – Wiretap Scars
16. A.F.I. – Sing The Sorrow
17. Kasey Chambers – Barricades & Brickwalls
18. Alkaline Trio – Good Mourning
19. Coheed And Cambria – In Keeping Secrets Of Silent Earth: 3
20. Bruce Springsteen – The Rising
21. Dropkick Murphys – Blackout
22. The Mars Volta – De-Loused In The Comatorium
23. NoFX – The War On Erroism
24. OutKast – Speakerboxxx/The Love Below
25. Lindi Ortega – The Taste Of Forbidden Fruit
26. Street Dogs – Savin Hill
27. The Strokes – Room On Fire
28. 50 Cent – Get Rich Or Die Tryin’
29. Action Action – Don’t Cut Your Fabric To This Year’s Fashion
30. Alexis MacIssac – Inspired
31. Jimmy Eat World – Bleed American
32. Jimmy Eat World – Futures
33. Keane – Hopes And Fears
34. The Killers – Hot Fuss
35. Killswitch Engage – The End Of Heartache
36. Madcap – Under Suspicion
37. Modest Mouse – Good People Who Love Bad News
38. Ray LaMontagne – Trouble
39. Regina Spektor – Soviet Kitsch
40. Bloc Party – Silent Alarm
41. Bright Eyes – I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning
42. Damian Marley – Welcome to Jamrock
43. Fiona Apple – Extraordinary Machine
44. Ludacris – Word Of Mouf
45. Franz Ferdinand – Franz Ferdinand
46. Weezer – Make Believe
47. Amy Winehouse – Black To Black
48. Angels & Airwaves – We Don’t Need To Whisper
49. As Tall As Lions – As Tall As Lions
50. Bob Dylan – Modern Times
51. The Decemberists – The Crane Wife
52. John Mayer – Continuum
53. Justin Timberlake – Futuresex/Lovesounds
54. Killswitch Engage – As Daylight Dies
55. M. Ward – Post-War
56. Mastodon – Blood Mountain
57. Nas – Hip Hop Is Dead
58. P!nk – I’m Not Dead
59. Pearl Jam – Pearl Jam
60. Red Hot Chili Peppers – Stadium Arcadium
61. Regina Spektor – Begin To Hope
62. The Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band – Big Damn Nation
63. Silversun Pickups – Carnavas
64. Sparta – Threes
65. Tenacious D – Tenacious D
66. Thom Yorke – The Eraser
67. Johnny Cash – American III: Solitary Man
68. Against Me! – New Wave
69. Bad Religion – New Maps Of Hell
70. Bon Iver – For Emma, Long Ago
71. Clutch – From Beale Street To Oblivion
72. Coheed And Cambria – No World For Tomorrow
73. Down – Down III: Over The Under
74. Once Soundtrack
75. The Hives – Tyrannosaurus Hives
76. Kate Nash – Made Of Bricks
77. Lindi Ortega – Fall From Grace
78. Nicole Atkins – Neptune City
79. Radiohead – In Rainbows
80. Thrice – The Alchemy Index I-IV
81. Emma-Lee – Never Just A Dream
82. Lil Wayne – Tha Carter III
83. Metallica – Death Magnetic
84. My Morning Jacket – Evil Urges
85. Nas – NaS
86. Opeth – Watershed
87. Ray LaMontagne – Gossip In The Grain
88. Sarah Shafey – Tiny Music Box
89. Bat For Lashes – Two Suns
90. Dredg – The Pariah, The Parrot, The Delusion
91. Alkaline Trio – From Here To Infirmary
92. The Irish Tenors – Ellis Island
93. Johnny Cash – American IV: The Man Comes Around
94. The Postal Service – Give Up
95. Sigur Ros – Agastis Byrjun
96. Tom Waits – Alice
97. Jay Z – The Blueprint
98. U2 – All That You Can’t Leave Behind
99. Outkast – Stankonia
100. The White Stripes – Elephant

Ok, if listing them at random is a cop-out, here at least is my Top-10:

1. Flogging Molly – Drunken Lullabies
2. Dredg – El Cielo
3. Arcade Fire – Funeral
4. Emma-Lee – Never Just A Dream
5. Thrice – The Alchemy Index
6. Eminem – The Marshall Mathers LP
7. Sigur Ros – ( )
8. Bon Iver – For Emma, Long Ago
9. A.F.I. – Sing The Sorrow
10. Sparta – Wiretap Scars

So there’s that.

When you’re a kid time has a way of passing with the speed and urgency of an elderly turtle with four broken legs on his way to visit his proctologist.  Important events—Christmas, your birthday, the end of the school day—always seem forever fleeting, forever away.  In fact, “This is taking forever” seems to be right up there in the adolescent lexicon with other standbys such as “I hate this” and “This sucks.”  Patient, kids of the wayfaring world are not; the journey for all intents and purposes hasn’t been invented yet, and even if it has it’s just an annoying means to get to what really matters: The finish line.  You don’t and can’t appreciate the process because you’ve always got your eye on the prize.  Studying for the test, the day-long car-ride to get to Cedar Point, writing letters to the girl in hopes she’ll first circle “Yes” and then somewhere down the line take her clothes off for you, they are just necessary evils; if life could be like a DVD everybody at that age would just skip to the “good” parts and say screw off the build-up.

I don’t know the age when that changes, when the second hand of life’s clock finds crack and gets addicted to speeding everything up on you.  But it happens.  Life turns into an hourglass and the more you try and slow things down the quicker the sand disappears and the conversation, or embrace, or night you’ve waited a lifetime for goes cold in your arms; turned from touchable to a tale you’ll end up telling over and over because it’s the only thing that can make you feel close to that moment again.

By the time I got to Edinboro I already had two-and-a-half years-worth of community college in tow.  Those two-and-a-half years took a total of almost four calendar years to get through, and they felt every bit of it.  But the two years it took me to finish up my Bachelor’s Degree at Edinboro flew by.  What seemed like an eternity in the making, before I knew it I went from carrying my things into the dorm, hot girl wearing a black thong in see-through pants on the stairs in front of me, to waiting for hours in a sweltering gymnasium to hear someone call my name in congratulations, hand me my quasi-diploma, immediately drive back to my apartment, carry my things out to my car, a fat woman with fat-lady underwear pushing out the top of her jeans in front of me, so I could move a quarter-mile down the street into an apartment with three friends to start the unabashed Summer of Justin.

Officially, I was an adult.  I was twenty-three and a two-time college graduate.  I never thought much about the future, but I suppose in the back of my mind I assumed it would be bright.  Growing up the people who are put there to help guide you through your formative years say things such as, “The sky’s the limit” and “If you put your mind to it you can accomplish anything” and I was still buying in to what they had sold me.  There’s a danger in using such vague terms on daydreamers who see the world in such vague colors.  But I wasn’t there yet.  Enough people asked me, “What’s next?” at my graduation party a few week later and I more or less told the lot of them that I was keeping my options open.  I wanted to write.  I might want to teach writing.  Most of all I wanted to experience life a bit more, see what else it had in store for me.  I wanted to find some inspiration.  And I meant all of it.

I’d wake up early and go to bed late.  Two of my roommates worked at a restaurant and would bring us home buckets of chicken wings that we’d eat after a long night of drinking.  When we weren’t at the bars we were sitting on our living room floor or on our balcony looking deep into the nothingness of shrubs and bushes and trees that smelled like cum, talking about everything and nothing in particular.  I listened to a lot of music that summer.  I was down to one job, and a big part of that job was stocking CDs.  I’d spend most of my shifts thumbing through them.  Some of the more interesting CDs I’d set aside and when it came around to payday I’d buy as many as I could afford.  One of the ones I bought early that summer was John Mayer’s Room For Squares.  He had one song, “No Such Thing” on the radio and more were soon to come.  The first time I heard “No Such Thing” I heard the voice of a man who sounded to be at about the same time and disposition of life as I was:

“Well I never lived the dreams of the prom kings

and the drama queens

I’d like to think the best of me

is still hiding up my sleeve

They love to tell you, “Stay inside the lines”

but something’s better on the other side

I want to run through the halls of my high school

I want to scream at the top of my lungs

I just found out there’s no such thing as the real world

just a lie you’ve got to rise above”

Ok, he was singing about someone who’d accomplished enough to give him the confidence to stand on a table at his ten-year reunion, in front of a bunch of douche bags that probably shunned him along the way, and give them all a one giant “F U!”  I wasn’t there yet; the truth was the only thing I accomplished was that someone gave me a piece of paper with my name on it.  But I was the first college graduate in my family.  The statement alone made me proud.  Perhaps too proud.  Saying it was enough for me; I could rest on the laurels of my “accomplishment” and be ok with it.  And I did.  I still had rebellion in my heart.  I didn’t exactly know what rebellion meant to me, but as the summer wore on it was on the tip of my tongue whenever someone at work asked me what was next.  I just knew I didn’t want to be part of “the real world.”

One hot summer night two of my roommates and I were at the bar and a girl who was in one of my English classes came over and sat with us.  She and I talked about graduation, about the burden of people asking us what we were going to do with our lives.  She was working as a waitress and had no real plans that would make anyone blush either.  It was a redeeming quality the way deep eyes, great conversation, or a nice rack is at other junctures in time.  She came home with us that night and after my roommates went to bed this girl and I stayed up most of the night.  We listened to Room For Squares on repeat and though she thought John Mayer was “a pussy” she could understand where he was coming from and it sounded like a comfortable enough place to visit.  We kissed just enough for both of us to want more, but stopped just short of regretting it.  The alcohol was talking and for once, for both of us, we decided not to listen.  Or so we said.

The next night I took out for the back country roads and thought about the previous night.  This girl wasn’t everything I wanted.  Truth be told she wasn’t anything that I wanted.  But in the Paula Abdul “Opposites Attract” sort of way she was.  She was a warm body, a good enough kisser, and she was at the same crossroads of life as I was.  She didn’t have a plan—didn’t want one—and that fact alone was enough to make me want her.  I went back to the bars for three nights after in hopes that she’d walk in, we’d have a few drinks, and pick up where we left off.  But she never came in.  After the third night I started to take it personal.

The third song on Room For Squares is “My Stupid Mouth” and in the ensuing days that became weeks I adopted it as my anthem.  I thought our night together had ended well enough—I couldn’t remember anything that might have set her off the tracks—but the fact that I couldn’t find her made me reassess everything I couldn’t remember saying that night.  Did I say too much?  Did I say too little?  Should I have reacted with more persistence?

“I’m never speaking up again

it only hurts me

I’d rather be a mystery than she desert me

oh, I’m never speaking up again

starting now “

My confidence took a nose-dive.  The Summer of Justin started to feel lonely and cold; the late-night talks and devouring of chicken wings suddenly didn’t hold the same promise or weight that they had at the beginning of the summer.  I stopped taking pride in the fact that I thought of myself as Mr. Not Have A Plan and started seeing myself as College Graduate: CD Stock Boy.  I wasn’t even appealing enough to keep someone I wasn’t appealed to around.  So I turned more to the music.

There’s a Catch-22 when it comes to putting your faith in the words of people who have succeeded when what they’re selling is failure, hope, heartache, and second-chances.  Once upon a time the only redemption Bruce Springsteen might have been able to offer a girl was beneath his dirty hood, but he’s been an uber-rich rock star for so long now that it’s hard to hear “Thunder Road” without thinking about the valet who is going to park his car when he gets where he’s going.  That’s a reason, I think, why true art will always be a young person’s calling.  That’s not to say that lasting art is impossible to create when you get beyond a certain age because it doesn’t; Bob Dylan’s work in the past decade and Johnny Cash’s American Recording series is all the proof anyone would need that art doesn’t die once you secure Social Security.  But there’s an honesty, an earnestness, a desperation when you’re young; what you have to say always feels like it’s the most important thing that anyone will ever say.  When you lose the platform to say it you want to fight for all you’re worth to get it back.  You might be jaded by people but you’re not yet jaded by the world.  Masterpieces are created.  Love is found.  Crazy nights are had.

One night towards the end of the summer, a few days after I’d moved into a new place with two of my closest friends, I went to the bar with the intention of drinking myself into the sort of inspire-minded stupor where I could leave my inhibitions on the bar stool when I was good and drunk and go home and start my masterpiece.  As I was getting ready to leave I felt a warmth ease into the barstool beside me.  It was the girl, in all of her “I’m sorry for avoiding you” glory.  I was just angry enough to avoid mentioning it all together.  When she suggested that we go back to her place I couldn’t think of a better thing to invest a “Sure” in.  When we started kissing her lips felt better than I’d remembered and I kissed her as if I’d never get another chance.  Her room was hot when we arrived, but as the session went on it started to feel like an interrogation room.  It was hard to breathe.  After a while, it got hard to concentrate.  Her body felt like sitting right next to a fire.  I leaned back to catch my breath, resting my head against the small fan she had beside her bed.  The next thing I remember the room was dark, except for a bright light across the room.  It took me a minute to gather my bearings, to figure out where I was.  When the situation came into focus I looked towards the light, which I realized was her computer screen, and I saw the girl sitting naked in her chair, a shiny object in her hand.  At first it looked like a stone; some obsidian rock you’d find washed up on some beach in the midnight moon.  But I couldn’t figure out why she’d be holding a rock in the middle of the night in her bedroom in some college town in Pennsylvania.  Just before the shiver of light met her skin I realized what it was: a knife.  Either out of fear or shock I watched as she made several small slices to her legs.  I watched her face in part to see how she’d react to the steel piercing her skin, but also to see if she was going to look on me.  The one time I started to see her turn her head in my direction I closed my eyes and pretended that I was asleep.  I opened one of my eyes just enough to see if she was creeping towards me, with knife in hand, ready to strike.  She cut herself a couple more times, wiped the blade clean with a Kleenex, set the knife in a sheath and tucked it into her bookcase.  She made her way over to the bed and laid beside me.  My eyes still closed, I felt her wrap her arm around me and let out a sigh as if she’d just walked through the door after a hard day at work.  Her breath was warm, almost comforting if I hadn’t just seen her cut herself multiple times with a knife as she sat in her computer chair.  In an instant I found myself believing in God, whispering in the dark that if I made it through the night with my head, manhood, and life intact, that I would change my ways for good.

I don’t remember falling back asleep but I remember waking up.    She was staring at me, her blue eyes looking deep into me.  “Good morning,” she said with the sort of quite confidence you have with someone you take pride in waking up next to.  “Morning,” I said, trying on my face to not show the “Holy Fu@k!” feeling I had inside.  When she leaned in to kiss me I was like a dear in headlights about to get smashed by the oncoming car.  It felt like I was kissing a girl who, just hours prior, cut herself five feet from me.  “So what do you want to do this morning?  Do you want to get breakfast or something?” she asked.  I heard myself say “No!” a decibel level below screaming it before I could stop myself.  “I’ve got…ah…ah…stuff to do.”  She asked if she could drive me, and she was wearing desperation better than she was wearing her own naked skin.  I didn’t want to look for cut-marks but all I wanted to do was look for cut-marks.  “No thank you” I said, and I could see the disappointment on her face.  I could see it in her eyes, all she wanted was the right answer.  And I was pretty sure she could see what I was thinking in my eyes; the “Get me the hell out of here you crazy bi!ch!” I was trying to fight.

When she dropped me off I sprinted up the driveway, through the front door, and went straight into my room locking both doors behind me.  Sitting on my bed, I looked around the room.  The silence was overwhelming, all I could see, all I could hear was the striking of her knife.  So I turned on my CD player.  The solace that I’d found in “Why Georgia” for that entire summer was gone.  That is not what he meant by a “quarter-life crisis.”  It couldn’t have been.  But that’s exactly what it felt like.

Since the day I started writing I was a failure.  I just never knew it.  Teachers gave me good grades, people gave me favorable comments, and the few places I submitted or contributed my stuff to published it.  I was a big fish in a small pond if only by default, but I had no reason to ever doubt my ability.  Nobody else did.  As the years passed by, and I started focusing more on writing, the pretentiousness level amongst my peers increased exponentially, but the quality of their writing more or less stayed the same: It sucked.

The first semester of my Senior Year in college I enrolled in a Fiction Workshop class.  It was a Monday night class at a satellite campus fifteen minutes away.  The distance seemed to keep away the window shoppers who might have otherwise thought the class an easy grade.  There were thirteen or so students, none of whom—including me—really looked like writers.  Our professor, however, looked exactly the part: Birkenstock sandals with Argyle socks, sweater vests and khaki pants, a gold pocket watch that he set on the desk in front of him before every class, he was every bit the stereotype; the underappreciated poet who was just teaching until his brilliant prose was discovered by the masses.  The class sat in a circle, and every week three or four of us would have our previous week’s assignment read aloud by someone who didn’t write it.  After each reading was finished, the rest of the class would comment or ask questions about what was read.  Our professor made it a point in our first meeting that he was in no way an expert on fiction; his cup of tea was, of course, poetry.  But he stressed that good writing defied format; “You’ll be able to hear it,” he’d say.  After the first few weeks I wasn’t so sure; It seemed as if it was going to be like every other writing class I’d taken: one giant circle jerk.  The writers weren’t looking for validation of their prose as much as they were a pat on the back for their troubles.  Brutally honest didn’t mean, “The description of your mother when she was crying could use some fleshing out,” it was more, “That sucks what happened to your mother.”  It was discouraging; I took the class with the intention to grow as a writer, to get beyond just writing poetry, just writing simple exposition.  Early on it looked like the only thing that would grow was my already extensive vocabulary when it came to sugar-coating things.  Before the third class I told myself if it didn’t get any better that night, I was going to quit it and find something else.  And then someone read the first line of the story from the guy with the clover on his hat:

“In sixth grade, I paid Kristine Barber ten dollars to touch her boob in the cafeteria. It was taco and guacamole day, just around Christmas, it was snowing out, and lunch was nearly over.”

I felt my stomach drop.  This wasn’t just good, it was great.  (Two years later, while riding down an elevator after a two-day workshop, best-selling author Chuck Palahniuk said the same thing to me about that line.)  I felt myself slide down in my chair.  Collectively, over all of the years that I’d been writing, everything, every word that left my pen wasn’t in the same league as those two sentences.  I went from feeling like a former semi-pro baseball player playing in a recreation softball league, to a former semi-pro baseball player trying to tell war stories to Derek Jeter.  Part of me wanted to quit; I thought it would be far more graceful, or at the very least less embarrassing to quietly bow out the back door than to have my words be read after his and be exposed for what they were: CRAP.  As the person read on in the story I listened, and like everyone else, I laughed.  Everyone knew this guy was good, but he just sat there, looking disinterested, rather unassuming as he slouched in his chair until everyone was finished with their comments.

Around the same time as the Fiction Workshop class, in the rap world the heavyweight battle to end all battles was in full-effect.  Jay-Z, on his album Blueprint, had just landed a devastating uppercut to Nas with his song, “Takeover.”  In it, amongst the below-the-belt “You know who did you know what with you know who” blast and other dizzying disses, Jay-Z said:

“Went from Nasty Nas to Esco’s trash

Had a spark when you started, but now you’re just garbage

Fell from top ten to not mentioned at all

To your bodyguard’s “Oochie Wally” verse better than yours.”

I’d been listening to Nas for years, since his debut album Illmatic came out when I was in high school.  Early on, Nas was the writer’s rapper; critics called him the best lyricist in rap, and that distinction seemed due.  Along with thanking the likes of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. in his liner notes, Nas was just as likely to thank Billy Joel and Bob Dylan.  He had his pulse on more than just the streets from which he was raised, he was educated in history, and he told compelling stories.  When I was in high school, I really started listening to rap because I couldn’t find any truth or personal identity in most grunge music.  Not that I could relate directly to what it was like to gang bang or sell crack, but there was a struggle in the Biggies, 2Pacs, and Wu-Tangs of the world, and the way they were conveying their message, in dizzying rhymes over catchy beats, it was exciting, fun even because you could listen in a communal setting and everyone might catch something different.  But as the years passed by, Biggie and 2Pac were murdered, Ol’ Dirty Bastard went loco, and on more than one album after It Was Written, the quality and focus of Nas’ work seemed to slip.  Along came a hungry Jay-Z; already respected for his flow, and a crossover success to boot he still needed his Michael Corleone popping Virgil Sollozzo moment and he took his best shot.

After “Takeover” came out, a short time later Nas responded on his album Stillmatic with the all-time counter punch in “Ether.”  In four-and-a-half minutes Nas annihilates everything from Jay-Z’s motivations:

“Y’all niggas deal with emotions like bitches

What’s sad is I love you ’cause you’re my brother

You traded your soul for riches”

to his manhood:

“You a fan, a phony, a fake, a pu$$y, a Stan

I still whip your ass, you thirty-six in a karate class?

You Tae-bo hoe, tryin’ work it out, you tryin to get brolic?

Ask me if I’m tryin’ to kick knowledge

Nah, I’m tryin’ to kick the shit you need to learn though

That ether, that shit that make your soul burn slow”

By the end of the barrage he tells Jay-Z he should apologize and it almost feels just; he should.

The fact of the matter is that both Jay-Z and Nas came out winners in their battle.  Jay-Z went after a made-man, a legend, and he slapped him upside his head pretty good.  Nas responded with his best album in years, and whether or not he regained his proverbial throne, he re-gained the respect of those who started to doubt him.  One of them lost the battle, but both of them won the war.  The only way to get better at anything is competition.  If you ever want to advance your skill, your trade, your art, you have to put yourself in a position where you’re surrounded, or at least aware of your talented peers.  Bob Dylan had The Beatles, Joe DiMaggio had Ted Williams, Ernest Hemingway had his “Lost Generation” cohorts.  Competition doesn’t always have to be as cut throat as it was between Jay-Z and Nas.  In Fiction Workshop, I wasn’t looking for a prose throw-down.  After I got beyond my initial insecurities I was excited by the possibility of being in the same class as someone so talented.  If I wanted to get the sort of reaction out of people that he got with his boob-touching beginning, I had to step my game up.  If I didn’t know how to do that, I had to learn.  I couldn’t just rest on my supposed—and as I could now see, completely exaggerated—laurels anymore.  If I ever wanted to be considered a good writer I had to learn how to write.

The prospect was a daunting task.  Some assignments I had better luck on than others.  When I’d get blocked I’d listen to Stillmatic the same way I used to listen to Dylan’s The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan when I started writing.  “Got UR Self A Gun” was a favorite listen; with its Sopranos theme sample, it’s both catchy and confident; the sign of a man who is through taking sh!t:

“To take it back to Africa, I did it with Biggie

Me and Tupac were soldiers of the same struggle

You lames should huddle, your team’s shook

Y’all feel the wrath of a killer, ’cause this is my football field

Throwin’ passes from a barrel, shoulder pads apparel

But the Q.B. don’t stand for no quarterback

Every word is like a sawed-off blast, ’cause y’all all soft

And I’m the black hearse that came to haul y’all ass in

It’s for the hood by the corner store

Many try, many die, come at Nas if you want a war, get it bloody, uh”

One of the redeeming qualities of Nas’ music is his vulnerability.  He wears his emotions on his designer sleeves better than anyone else in rap.  “One Mic” is a lyrical Memento; built off a Phil Collins “In The Air Tonight” sample, the song slowly gains momentum that amplifies his rage and outright dystopian outlook on the state of things before it quells to an almost hypnotic, hopeful whisper:

“This is crazy, I’m on the right track I’m finally found

You need some soul searchin, the time is now”

For the second of two short stories I had to write for Fiction Workshop I chose to write about Woodstock ’99.  Though rooted in some truth—some things I saw when I was there, a little bit on the sequence of events to actually get some of my friends there, a band or two that I saw perform—the heart of the story was more or less made up.  But writing the story allowed me to think deeper about some things I couldn’t quite get my head wrapped around at the time: the randomness of the people who ended up there, the complete disregard by so many for even the slightest bit of decency towards so few, the fact that the whole event felt secondary to the actual experience of that many people in one place at the same time.  Writing that story felt like my first attempt at a short story all over again.  It was exciting, scary, and disjointed; far from polished, but because of how hard I was pushing myself, the story was far from horrible either.  It had its redeeming moments, and moments were something to build off of.

As for the other guy in the class, well, he’s still the best writer I’ve ever read.  I’d even take being Bushwick Bill to his Jay-Z.

Sometimes there is no good explanation for what happens in life, the ways and whys of things, how paths sometimes lead you to unclaimed $20 bills, how in certain rooms at certain times you fall in love with someone you wouldn’t otherwise give a second-look to.  The same thing goes for music; it’s just as much about circumstance as it is anything else.  Overwhelmed by two jobs, a full class load, mounting debt, and a faltering love life my defenses were weak; I was ripe for infection.  So I did what anyone in my disposition at that particular point in time did: I listened to Dashboard Confessional.

The chill of winter was threatening from a not so far off distance.  Classes were going as well as could be expected; I was managing my way around Thomas Hardy, Sherwood Anderson, Amy Tan, and an endless cast of others without ever getting to really know them.  With a Masters in bullshit I was two semesters away from B.S.’ing my way to a B.A. in English-Writing.  My grades were good, really good considering there were far too many nights that we tried to see if we could get our BAC higher than our GPA.  When I wasn’t half-ignoring my professors as they went on about the symbolism behind Edna Pontellier’s houses in The Awakening, I was changing out pool towels, tearing tickets at the movie theater, trying my best to ignore the advances—usually drunken—of a friend.  I liked her just fine, but I didn’t know if I could like her in a Circle “Yes” or “No” sort of way.  We had a lot of the same interests: obscure quotes, Stephen King, 80’s hair bands, cheese pizza, but when I’d really allow myself to think about the possibilities she was always teetering in that lonely grey area of being too good of a friend to risk it; I knew that area well, spent most of my teenage years there, and it never felt good.  A big part of me didn’t want to risk it.  Plus she was the ex-girlfriend of one of my best friends; that gave me a built-in excuse.

By that time I was fed up with having to drive twenty minutes back and forth to work every day.  With winter close I was looking for a closer alternative to crappy pay.  A month prior Wal-Mart opened up on top of the hill and it didn’t take long for it to cast its shadow.  Ames was being read its last rites, Giant Eagle was never very good to begin with, and out of the few places that weren’t closing up shop the only other alternatives were on-campus jobs or at one of the fast food joints.  Wal-Mart didn’t look like such a bad option so I applied and a few days later I was hired.  I was given the option of Sporting Goods or Electronics.  The choice was easy; I didn’t know jack about hunting or fishing, but I knew my way around the A-Z section of the Rock/Pop selection.

Metallica had their artillery locked in on Napster.  A lot of my friends were always seeking the new hot alternative to free music but for some reason I always felt guilty about it.  Plus, my internet connection sucked, and there was just something about the physical CD, looking over the artwork, reading the lyrics while you listened to the music; it felt more like an experience to me.  What little money I made from Wal-Mart that didn’t go to bills or booze I used to buy CDs.  One of the first ones I bought was Dashboard Confessional’s The Places That You Come To Fear The Most.  Their songs were a favorite on mix-CDs amongst my friends, and the first time I heard “Shirts And Gloves” from their previous album the lyrics seemed witty and heartfelt enough for where I was at.

There’s something to be said about rock bottom, when it stops being just a hypothetic threat.  For everybody it looks a little different: the level of carnage, the depths to the tracks of tears and failed promises.  But for anybody who has listened to The Places That You Come To Fear The Most it pretty much sounds the same.  Elliot Smith was more talented (and strung out) than Dashboard Confessional, and a helluva lot less whiny, but he had nothing in sincerity department on them.  In a dishonest world, one that I was doing my due-diligence to be a contributing part of, Chris Carrabba’s voice was an honest flag-bearer for every sad bastard who wanted in for the ride.  “The Best Deception” became an anthem:

“I heard about your regrets

I heard that you were feeling sorry

I heard from someone that you wish you could

Set things right between us

Well I guess I should’ve heard of that from you

I guess I should have heard of that from you.”

On one hand it made sense, I could relate; my ex-girlfriend was sending feelers through a mutual friend that she wanted to “set things right between us.”  I had managed to forget her, at least make her feel like I had forgotten her, and that bugged her.  It was a game, a power struggle, and I knew it.  As much as I wanted to be above games I wasn’t, and if I was going to play this one I was in it to win it.  On the other hand, when I listened to “The Best Deceptions” it made me strive for something more.  She had hurt me bad, but not the sort of heartache that inspires the power to belt out a line like, “Don’t you see, don’t you see that the charade is over?”  I felt cheated; I wanted the sort of love that could end in such a beautiful disaster.  With that girl who liked me, she had felt that sort of heartache from my friend—I’d heard it from both parties throughout the year I knew them—and the more I thought about it, the more that bothered me.  It was a driving force behind my hesitation towards acting on her advances; it wasn’t that I wanted to be the one to have that sort of power over her, or her over me, but I knew that my friend had already put her through the wringer; if she was listening to “The Best Deceptions” while we were kissing, she wouldn’t be thinking about me, she’d be thinking about him.

There isn’t much in the way of logic when you’re lost, and people who know where they’re going don’t tend to listen to Dashboard Confessional.  But I was lost; I had on a pair of those old-men-who-drive-Powder-Blue-Buicks blinders, and I listened as if “The Places That You Come To Fear The Most” was the gospel.

“And the grave that you refuse to leave

The refuge that you built to flee

The places that you’ve come to fear the most

Is the place that you come to fear the most.”

The irony, of course, is easy; it doesn’t have to come to the point where you start seeing shapes dancing in the yellow wallpaper before you figure out it’s time to get the hell out of the room.  Halloween was fast approaching and my roommates and I were planning on having a party.  They saw it as an opportunity to have some friends over; I saw it as a viable excuse to leave my room; a chance to lose myself in costume for a night.

Four of us got a jump start on the party and before it actually started one of them was already passed out.  I was a pimp left to his two ho’s.  As people arrived I remembered less and less of them arriving.  The strobe light was pulsing in tune with the music and there was smoke everywhere.  People were smiling as they coughed, slamming shots in between sneezes.  We were a dancing bunch of fools and I was the ringleader.  Soon, my pants were torn and my shirt was drenched.  I was posing for pictures and trying to play matchmaker.  Inhibitions were at all-time lows and romance was in the air; I was hell-bent on making sure no one went to bed alone.  One of my ho’s, a friend who would later become a roommate, her and I made a pact not too far into the night that if all else failed, we’d have each other to wake up next to.  Somewhere in the melee she disappeared; I either set her up or she took it upon herself to find another option.  The number of people fluctuated through the night as people party-hopped.  After a while prospects started to look like the NASDAQ crawl on the trading room floor near closing-bell time; all of the good deals were getting scooped up quickly.  The clock and the dwindling supply of alcohol were fast becoming the enemy; it was put up or shut up time.  I overheard the girl who’d been sending me the drunken advances tell a friend that she had to go to the bathroom.  I snuck around the corner and beat her to it.  As she walked in I closed the door behind her and locked us in the room.  “Hey,” I said.  “Hey,” she said back.  The room-long mirror showed the haze in both of our eyes but I couldn’t stop staring into hers.  My shirt was in shambles, my pleather-pants imbedded into my skin, her sweat-stained skirt was stuck to her thighs.  Before either of us could say what both of us were thinking I pulled her to me and kissed her.  We fell into the wall and the towel rod exploded into the air.  After we kissed until neither of us could breath we took a second to laugh, and then went back to it.  There was a pounding on the door; the fat kid from the dorm who ate all of my Pop-Tarts was yelling that he had to go to the bathroom.  Separately we tried to ease our way past him into my room without him noticing but just as he put two-and-two together I closed the door behind me.  In the dark we were left with each other.  “Are you just doing this because you’re drunk or because you mean it?”  No matter how I replied it was going to look like the former, and I knew that, and because of that I didn’t want to say anything.

I waited until it got good and dark before I called her the next day.  I didn’t want to be that guy who called too soon, who seemed to desperate.  But from the time she left that morning to the time I heard her say, “Hey,” to me over the phone I couldn’t stop thinking about her.  She was surprised when I called, she gave me the “Things Happen…” disclaimer, and she said she wouldn’t hold it against me if it was just a heat of the moment thing.  But it wasn’t; in the space in between when she left I wrote a poem for her:

Thoughts of Seeing Your Smile

Thoughts are supposed to pass like cars

On the freeway in mid-afternoon.

Not mine,            oh no.

With the screeching halt of the smoking tires

Mine                     Stopped.

A blissful pause.

Your smile was like the dawning of a new day,

Melting all the snow of years passed.

And I don’t know why…

Nothing is suppose to feel this easy and this

Care       free.

I’m not a child anymore but you give me back

The youth I never had each time

Your blue eyes look at me–your lips

Reaching upward revealing that sly,

Subtle look I know only as heaven.

And I must confess I like it.  How can I not?

It’s you…

Like a tide I tried to fight it, but I was

Washed away to              S              E              A.

I can’t swim.

Then again, when all is said and done with

I can’t think of a better place to

D

R

O

W

N.

Your smile is like an hourglass

Turn me round, and upside down

And I’m right back where I started.

On the freeway in mid-afternoon

SPLAT

My heart             Your smile

Heaven,

washed away for all to      S           E              E.

A week or so passed by of us hanging out every night and I felt comfortable enough to give it the poem to her.  She appreciated it for what it was worth, I could see it in her eyes, and it was the first time in a long time that I got lost in the moment and let the moment overwhelmed me.  We were similar in so many ways that it was hard not to take things for granted; laughing didn’t feel easy, it just was.  We could talk about books, or movies, or music, things that with our other friends we might not be able to, and it all felt organic.  It almost felt perfect.

Almost.

There was always an elephant in the room, even after I finally mustered up the courage to tell my friend that I was seeing his ex-girlfriend, to which he replied, “It’s about time.”  As the days turned into weeks and the weeks into months, as nice as the house was, both of us could see the foundation was built on Pixie-Sticks.  We were both insecure people looking for security in each other, that wasn’t going to work; it couldn’t.  The things that we needed to be saying to each other we couldn’t; it was easier to fall back into our routine and become the people who found solace in each other in the first place: loners.

Before long, the inevitable happened: I started listening to Dashboard Confessional again.  This time around “This Ruined Puzzle” about summed things up:

“But the hours they creep, the pattern repeats

Don’t be concerned, you know I’ll be fine on my own

I never said, “Don’t go.” “

I’ll never be confused for a prophet; if I could tell the future there wouldn’t have been any heartache, any bad decisions, I wouldn’t have invested in Beanie Babies.  But on more than one occasion in my life I’ve had these overwhelming feelings—a sixth sense, intuition, or whatever you call it—where I knew what was going to happen.  At 18, while sitting at work, I had an urge to play the numbers 349 in the Daily Numbers lottery.  I’d never played Pick 3 before, or gambled in any form really, but the urge was so strong I went with it, I spent fifty cents and I ended up winning $120.  A month later I had the same sort of feeling, only it was to play New York Yankees uniform numbers as NY Lotto numbers.  This time I didn’t give in to the urge.  Two weeks later, on the front page of the local paper, there was an article about a man who won the lottery playing New York Yankees jersey numbers the same night I had my urge.  When I was 20 I spent a week in Bangor, Maine trying to find myself.  I never did, find myself that is, but for that week, every turn I made I knew what was going to be around the corner, what the buildings were going to look like; I really felt like I’d been there before.  Maybe part of it, maybe all of it was coincidence: I’d seen the numbers 349 earlier that day on a price tag or something, or I had just watched a Yankees game, or I’d read so much Stephen King that the streets I was traveling were the same ones he often wrote about.  I don’t know.

A few weeks into the fall semester I was lost.  The girl I’d spent the summer counting away the calendar to see, after that first party her and I stopped talking.  I had five literature classes with a total of 84 novels to read, and one Fiction Workshop which I had no idea how to approach because creatively I hadn’t written anything longer than four or five stanzas since I was 15.  I had two jobs; I worked around 40 hours a week.  When I was home, I’d lie in my bed and stare at the ceiling, too worn down to focus on reading, too uninspired to write.  Sleep was scarce, and I started having nightmares.  One night I woke up drenched in sweat.  I was having this dream where I was tightrope walking between two skyscrapers; the cable was covered in grease and the sneakers I was wearing had no tread left on them.  Hundreds of feet beneath me were all of my friends from college and some other people from my past.  I could see all of their faces, their expressions.  They were whispering things to each other that I couldn’t hear.  After a while of watching me inch my way forward, they all started to scatter.  I yelled down to try to get them to stop but they either didn’t hear me or they didn’t care.  I considered jumping; I wasn’t doing that good walking anyway, but before I could talk myself into it I slipped and fell off the rope.  As I shot towards the ground I reached my hand back up in a desperate attempt to save myself.  I didn’t want to die; I wanted to see what was on the other side of the rope.  Unlike every other dream throughout my life where falling was involved this time I didn’t wake up before I hit the ground.  I felt the impact of the cement; it felt like twenty people simultaneously whacking me with baseball bats.  But I didn’t die; when I got my bearings I rolled over and looked up.  My past, the people from it, were staring through me.  Some were rolling their eyes, others were laughing.  From above them I saw something descending down like a rocket.  Right before impact I woke up.

That morning, on my way to work, I couldn’t shake the dream.  On top of that I had to have Emma, The Great Gatsby, The Cleveland Connection, and Tess Of The D’Urbervilles read by the end of the week; two of them I also had journals due on, the other two I had to write papers about.  For my Fiction Workshop, I had to write the first draft of a story.  My grandmother was sick; her mind was abandoning her.  I wanted to try and work things out with the girl, but I was didn’t feel confident in what I had to say so I didn’t say anything.  My job was mindless to begin with—mopping the lobby, vacuuming the hallways, changing light bulbs—and having too much time to think only made matters worse.  The only thing I was looking forward to was the release of Bob Dylan’s Love & Theft.  It was Monday; I had one more day to wait.  I’d been counting off the days like a kid does towards Christmas; even if everything else was doing me wrong at least there would be Dylan.  After my four-hour shift, as I was packing up my stuff to leave a current day’s newspaper was sitting beside my bag.  For some reason—beyond the Sports section I’d never really read USA Today—I grabbed the paper and stuffed it in my bag.

I drove back to campus; bs’d my way through my full day of classes, and went back to my apartment.  My roommates weren’t home, and I didn’t feel like being alone so I walked over to my friend’s place, which was more or less a gathering place for everybody around.  We had a few drinks, talked about the new Madden football, about the upcoming baseball playoffs.  Right before I’d gone over to their place I checked my email.  I got a five-word one from the girl: “We’re dropping out of school.”  Sitting on my friend’s couch, drink in my hand, staring into the TV I felt like a volcano about to erupt.  All of the pressure in my body was focusing on my head.  I tried to take a deep breath but I couldn’t get any air.  Panicked, I ran out the open door, down two flights of steps, and in between their building and the one next to it.  I knew I was going to cry and I didn’t want anyone to see me doing it.  A friend of mine, my roommate that previous summer, he caught up to me just as the tears revealed themselves.  I was hysteric; one of those people you see in movies getting dragged out of the courtroom.  He braced me against the brick wall; to keep me from running, or falling, or doing whatever I had a mind to do, I don’t know.  He kept asking me what was wrong and after a while I shouted a bunch of gibberish about my grandmother being on the verge of dying, about how I couldn’t take six classes and forty hours of work each work, about how Thomas Hardy sucked, about how I couldn’t even afford the new Dylan CD, about how the girls were dropping out of college.  “They’re dropping out?” I heard him say over my own pathetic voice.  For some reason that calmed me enough to explain what I knew of the matter.  He had a vested interest; his ex-girlfriend, the same girl who’d sent me Jimmy Eat World lyrics and we became kindred spirits, she was one of the We’re, along with another mutual friend of ours.  In an instant, like some grand illusion, all of my emotion had transferred over to him.  Before I knew what we were doing we were on our way over to the dorm we used to live in, where the girls still did.  The three of them were sitting on the front stoop as if they knew we were coming.  Collectively they’d decided school wasn’t for them; they sold back all of their books, dropped all of their classes, and were on the way to purchase one-way bus tickets to Florida.  “Why?” we asked.  “Because,” was more or less their answer.  In the chaos of the conversation it ended up where the only two people left were the girl who, not even two weeks prior I thought was the one, and I.  We were sitting on the same bench we had six months earlier only the feeling in the air was an entire climate different.  The only thing I could really muster up to say was, “I’m sorry.”  And I was.

The next morning I was drained; tired from my lack of sleep, upset that I’d let my emotions show the way they had, betrayed by the fact that I seemingly had no control over the people I cared about.  As I walked out to my car the air gave me a boost.  The sky was clear blue as far as you could see; it was warm.  Despite my disposition it felt good to be alive.  I rolled down all my windows, opened up my sunroof, and tried to focus on how beautiful it was outside and the fact that in a couple of hours, one way or another, I’d be listening to Dylan’s new CD.  When I got to work, compartmentalized inside the cold walls of the hotel, the pep I had started to fade; reality was settling back in.

I was on the second floor vacuuming the hall when I heard a voice from behind me yelling something.  I turned the power on the vacuum off and turned around.  “You always talk about wanting to live in New York City but I don’t know why you’d want to live in a place where planes smash into buildings,” one of the maids said.  It took a minute to register what she was saying and even after it did I didn’t know how to respond.  “What are you talking about?” I asked.  “Some plane hit a building,” she said, “it’s on the news.”  The girl had always creeped me out, so instead of joining her in the room she was cleaning to see what she was referring to I took the elevator down to the lobby.  By the time I got there a few of the morning crowd were gathered around the television, their morning bagel or muffin in their hands.  Just as I got into position to see the television a plane crashed into a building.  I had no idea if this was a replay; if somehow what the maid was referring to had been caught on video.  For a second my eyes moved away from the fireball on TV to the right hand of the guy standing next to me, and the plastic cup of orange juice he just dropped.  Its descent towards the carpet I’d vacuumed just a half-hour earlier was like watching a DVD frame-by-frame.  By the time it finally hit the floor and erupted orange juice over everyone’s legs someone had screamed out, “Oh my God!”  It wasn’t a replay, or some Hollywood stunt.  This was real.

I don’t remember how long I stood in that same spot, my leg covered in orange juice, my eyes fixed on the television.  It was long enough for a third plane to crash into the Pentagon and a fourth one to crash a couple hours south of the hotel lobby where I was standing.  It was long enough to make me remember every last person I thought I forgot; the things I said to them, the things I wish I had.  It was long enough for me to reassess what the word love really meant, and how I wished more than anything that I had someone I was in love with right then so I could call them and make sure they were ok.  It was long enough for me to call my mother and tell her that I was alright, and that I loved her.  And it was long enough for me to breath and be scared just like everyone else standing around me.  After enough time passed, my boss came over and said, “We all have to go back to work,” I told her no; I couldn’t.  I walked back to the break room, started gathering up my stuff, and like the day before, the day’s paper was sitting next to my bag.  I threw the USA Today in my backpack, went out to my car, drove down the street to Best Buy and put Modern Times on my credit card.  I couldn’t really afford the CD, but felt like I couldn’t afford to not have the CD either.

There was a lot of uncertainty that day; classes were cancelled, everyone was told to spend time with their loved ones, with their friends.  Everyone gathered around televisions; we looked for answers, for a voice of reason: Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, and Wolf Blitzer weren’t prophets either; they were just as lost as the rest of us were, but they would do, and they did.

That night, in the campus gym, there was a candlelight vigil for the people killed in catastrophes.  I went with the girl who, depending on who was looking at it, was my ex-girlfriend.  We held hands when they played “Taps” and “Amazing Grace” on bagpipes; we shared tears and “I’m sorry’s.”  When I finally retired to myself, I wrote a few lines in the journal I was trying to keep.  It said something about the attacks on the Twin Towers, about how my previous day’s antics were stupid and selfish, something about carpe diem, something about love.  In times of tragedy we always become soothsayers of change.  Regrets weigh on us; they feel like ships with broken rudders we’re hell-bent on fixing.  We see that life really does come with an expiration date, that we’re not going to live forever, and we panic.  I was no different; I became an arbiter of second-chances.

From the first listen, “Mississippi” blew me away.  Dylan had hundreds of songs, hundreds of songs I knew and loved by heart, but this one was like a dagger right through my heart, and given the day’s events it made that much more sense:

“Got nothing for you, I had nothing before
Don’t even have anything for myself anymore
Sky full of fire, pain pourin’ down
Nothing you can sell me, I’ll see you around”

I laid on my bed and listened, thinking of those lines, how prophetic they were.  I thought about faces of people I couldn’t see, people who woke up feeling the same hope I had when they saw how beautiful and blue the sky was, people who, like me, couldn’t wait to hear Dylan’s new CD, people who in a flash of fire never had the chance to hear “Mississippi” or say, “I’m gonna look at you ‘til my eyes go blind” one last time.  To this day this is one of Dylan’s most endearing lines to me.  It’s both beautiful and haunting, an endearment just as much it could be a threat.  That night, I picture couples sitting on swings, staring into each other’s eyes, listening to that song together.  Before it would get to the end one of them would disappear.

“Walking through the leaves, falling from the trees
Feeling like a stranger nobody sees
So many things that we never will undo
I know you’re sorry, I’m sorry too”

Regret is a motherf**ker; I never wanted to feel it again.

The next day I went to work.  I went through the motions.  When it was time to leave I packed up my backpack; I grabbed the USA Today again and put it with the previous two day’s editions.  That night, after another long day of watching CNN, I sat in my room, I listened to Love & Theft, and I looked over the three newspapers, at the sequence of headlines from one day to the next; from the self-important to the sublime to the surreal.

“Po Boy” was another song that from first-listen found my ears well.

“Knockin’ on the door, I say, “Who is it and where are you from?”
Man says, “Freddy!” I say, “Freddy who?” He says, “Freddy or not here I come.”
Poor boy ‘neath the stars that shine
Washin’ them dishes, feedin’ them swine”

As close to the apocalypse as people felt they were, sooner or later they were going to have to stop waiting for the knockout punch to come and start putting one foot in front of the other again; they had to move on.  After a week or so I turned off CNN and became a hypocrite like so many others did.  I went back to ignoring the library of books I had to read, to putting off papers I had to write, to pining over the one who got away.  In life, we all have a part to play.  Most of us aren’t as noble as we’d like to be, as sympathetic as claim to be, or as motivated as we promise to be in the future.  The future for me was already a thing of the past; I wasn’t ready for a new position just yet; it would still be months before I could truly appreciate “Summer Days” for what it could be, before I could give in to my feet and let them dance again.

The writing bug first bit me in 11^th grade.  I was taking a Journalism class, and for our final exam my teacher gave me two options: interview the gym teacher about the track-and-field team, or write a short story.  I had no idea what went into writing a short story, but interviewing the gym teacher about the track-and-field team sounded about as enticing as getting kicked in the nuts by every member of the track-and-field team.  So I picked the story.  Besides, when she said short story I heard short story: How hard could it be?  For two nights after school I sat on the end of my bed, my word processor on a TV stand in front of me, Sportscenter playing on the television behind it, and I wrote.  The story was about a perfect nuclear family with a nuclear bomb for a father.  There was nothing memorable about the plot, and the characters were all cookie cutters, but it felt exciting as I wrote it, getting in the heads of people that I’d created.  The last day, when the teacher handed the story back, on the back page she wrote, “You show a lot of promise.  You should take creative writing!” So I did.  When you’re 15 it doesn’t take much to convince you to do something; someone says, “You should eat 17 rolls of Bubble Tape at the same time” or “You should take creative writing” and sure, they sound like the best ideas ever.

In creative writing, we focused mainly on poetry.  I didn’t care much for reading poetry, and until my teacher explained that music—at least good music; he was the one who introduced me to Bob Dylan—was poetry, I didn’t care much for listening to it either.  But poetry seemed easy enough to write.  It was short—again, I was the type of person that could get down with short—and a lot of the time it rhymed.  Girls, the few that I shared what I wrote with, seemed to like what I had to say.  At that age that was the only validation I needed; if something I wrote could get me closer to someone I wanted to get closer to, that’s a hormonal trifecta; I’m off to the races.

I wrote bad poetry for a solid six or seven years before the burden of writing bad poetry for six or seven years finally wore on my psyche; I was both uninspired and unconvinced in my ability.  Though I declared my major as English-Writing when I moved away to college, it was more me being hopeful that I’d get back to the place where writing was exciting than it was me being realistic; how do you justify your major area of study being something that you don’t do anymore?  I don’t know; I didn’t have the answer, but I did it anyway.  My first semester, I took Creative Writing college style, and don’t you know it, the main focus was poetry.  Right before class began one day I started and finished my assignment.  It was supposed to be a love poem—aren’t they all?—and I remember throwing in some line about Milton and Paradise Lost; “Hey Milton, Paradise found me” or something.  When I read the poem aloud that line got a chuckle; my teacher even went out of her way to say she liked it.  As class ended, and I was packing up my things, a girl walked over to me and said, “I really liked your poem.  We should hang out sometime and talk.”  I was 22 now, but sitting in that chair, the insides of my eyes were a television as I watched myself time travel back to when I was 15; “Sounds great,” I said, shit-eating grin obvious to anyone looking.  My sense of validation apparently hadn’t changed much over the years.  Sure, I knew I was doomed; it’s like winning the lottery the first time you play it, or having the best steak of your life the first time you eat one; you get spoiled, you start expecting.  A few weeks later someone else in that class wrote a better poem than I had and that girl was saying, “I really liked your poem, we should hang out sometime” to them, and I was right back where I started, a Writing major who couldn’t seem to write.

The first time I heard Ani Difranco she was opening up for Bob Dylan.  When she walked out on stage, I remember either saying to myself or aloud, “Who the hell is?” this girl with purple hair and Duct-taped nails.  Her guitar made her tiny frame look even smaller, but when she started playing, she had this massive sound; it was as if she was unleashing all Holy-Hell on the world.  She was good, damn good, but that night I wasn’t in the frame of mind to get her.  Years later, single and miserable, I came across “Untouchable Face” and Ani’s music suddenly made sense to me.

My second semester, a major conference focusing on the writing of Chuck Palahniuk was coming to campus.  I was new to Palahniuk’s work; we’d read Fight Club and Survivor for my Modern Fiction class, and my teacher/conference organizer gave me her advance copy of his soon-to-be-released novel Choke, which I read in one, all-night sitting.  As part of the conference, I had to write a paper on some theme of Palahniuk’s work, and then I had to do a presentation on my paper.  I chose to write about the nihilistic tendencies of Palahniuk’s characters; the whole when everything is lost, that’s when you start to find who you are thing.  That weekend of the conference, I had also planned a trip to New York City with my wishing well, the girl I was in love with.  Myself, along with two other people I was grouped with who had similar themes they were going to talk about, lead off the first day of presentations at the conference.  The night prior to me writing my paper, to help get me rolling, a bunch of us were sitting around my dorm and we started talking about Fight Club the movie, and before long the discussion turned hypothetical; if you wanted to really hurt the US, would you aim for Wall Street (their money), the White House (their leadership), or the Pentagon (their force).  In my discussion at the conference, I made this dorm room hypothetical a big part of what I said.  After I was done a few people, including Palahniuk, came up and we discussed what I had said a bit more.  Hurried for time—truth be told, I had ass, not Armageddon, on my mind—I handed Palahniuk my book to sign.  “Nothingness is the best place to start every time,” was what he wrote.  After he handed me the book, we shook hands, and he thanked me for my presentation, I walked back over to the dorm, loaded up the car, and we were on our way to New York City.

In the CD player was Ani Difranco’s new release, the double-disk Revelling/Reckoning.  The album was more jazz-oriented than the Difranco I was used to, but just as introspective; the perfect album for a six-hour car ride through the nothingness that is central Pennsylvania.  The opening song of the Revelling disk, “Ain’t That The Way” ends with the line, “Love makes me feel so dumb,” and that was my state of mind; not the Gomer Pyle definition of dumb, but where you’re constantly looking for the right thing to say, and that right way seems forever fleeting; the cat’s always got your damn tongue.  On the ride we talked about what we had to see once we got to the city, what type of food we had to eat.  It was stuff we’d talked about for weeks, but now that it was about to be a reality, it seemed more urgent to sort out.  Long before the first time I stepped foot on the cracked concrete of Broadway, New York City was like my Atlantis; some mythical place where one day I’d arrive and it’d feel like I’d finally arrived.  On that trip, the transition to night almost complete, as the bright lights of the skyline came into view, it felt like walking onto a Hollywood set, script in hand, to make a movie starring us.  We’d been seeing each other for two months and so far our boundaries weren’t concrete.  We’d said a lot of things to each other but, “I love you” wasn’t one of them; at times I ever wondered if it would be.  As I reached across the center console and took a hold of her hand I felt the electricity that the city and her were giving off.  This weekend was going to be magic; if ever we were going to share those three words with each other it was going to come now.

“I’m a good kisser

And you’re a fast learner

And that kinda thing could float us

For a pretty long time.”

“Marrow” was the first song I fell in love with from the Revelling disk; perfectly serene, it’s the shining example of music as poetry, the way my teacher so many years before tried to convince a class that it could be.  We took all of the typical tourist sites that NYC had to offer: the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, the Twin Towers, Times Square, all the way down to Canal Street.  We devoured too many slices of pizza, ate too much street meet.  Our feet hurt and our wallets were empty.  We took a rest on some bench in Central Park and looked back on it all.  She asked me what it was that first attracted me to her and I said that line from, “Marrow.”  It wasn’t the first thing that attracted me to her, that was her eyes, but I was too wrapped in the moment to state the obvious.  She smiled at my response, her eyes a sparkling sheen on par with the majesty of city lights around us; that was all the validation I needed.

The night we got back from NYC, not too long after I’d finished unpacking, she called me up to her room.  So wrapped up in the revelry of the weekend I’d missed the fact the we forgot the formality of saying, “I love you.”  When I got upstairs, she told me to sit down.  She grabbed my hand.  We looked at each for a minute but the silence was overwhelming.  “I love you too,” I said.  I waited a minute before I really looked into her eyes.  They were distant; focused somewhere beyond me.  Her hand was cold, felt like bacon when you first pull it out of the package.  “My ex-boyfriend is coming up this week,” she said, “He’s staying with me.”  I don’t know how long it took me to stand up from her bed but it couldn’t have been too far off the World Record pace.  She tried her best to pull me back but it didn’t work; I was down the stairs, in my car, and halfway to nowhere before she could say, “Wait.”

That night, the miles were covered in molasses.  Every inch brought on another metaphor that somehow I’d missed; the streets were full of signs: caution signs, detour signs, the sort of signs you miss when you’re looking beyond what’s in front of you, and for two months that’s just what I’d been doing.

“But as bad as I am

I’m proud of the fact

That I’m worse than I seem.”

From the moment I heard that line I wanted it inscribed on my tombstone.  “Grey” was one of those songs that any sad bastard could appreciate; an anthem if you were looking for the autonomy of a brooding night alone.  After that talk, at least her part in the sixteen-word conversation, I was in for countless brooding nights alone; I needed them.  I’d sacrificed a lot for this girl, a lot more than I had to give, and worse yet, I started sacrificing my opportunities.  Instead of spending a weekend amongst people with the same interests/ambitions as I had, I passed over a major conference that was a hundred yards from where I lived for a pipedream an eternity away.  As much as I wanted to be able to say, “This isn’t me” it was me; this is who I let myself become.  I needed to find a mirror, one that told the truth, not one of those Rocky Dennis in Mask carnival mirrors where everything looks fine.  Things weren’t just fine; they felt closer to a verse in “Tamburitza Lingua.”

“and everything seems to have gone terribly wrong that can

but one breath at a time is an acceptable plan

she tells herself

and the air is still there

and this morning it’s even breathable

and for a second the relief is unbelievable

and she’s a heavy sack of flour sifted

her burden lifted

she’s full of clean wind for one lean moment

and then she’s trapped again

reverted

caged and contorted

with no way to get free

and she’s getting plenty of little kisses

but nobody’s slippin’ her the key”

Nobody was going to give me the key; if I wanted it, I had to find it.  So I had nothing.  At least that gave me a place to start.  I saw that I was going to have to go slowly; I would need to learn everything all over again.

I survived my first year at college.  It wasn’t without scars; after deciding to return, despite the debacle at the end of my first semester, not too far into the second one I fooled around and fell into credit card debt.  I got blinded by a smile.  It was a damn good smile, easy on the eyes, and easier on the knees.  I fell hard, the closed-eyes heave of a half-dollar into a wishing well.  As the months went by I kept on wishing.  It got expensive; I was investing more than I could afford.  But the deeper I got, the more I thought she’d come around.  I never realized that love is like buying real estate; for every looks-too-good-to-be-true tale turned favorable there are dozens of paved-over Poltergeist realities.  The deeper into it you get, the harder you’ll try to dig yourself out, ignoring the fact that shovels don’t do much good in quicksand.  One night, the last night of the second semester, the proverbial shit hit the fan.  Things: words, insecurities, actual fans, were being thrown about by couples and singles alike.  I took refuge outdoors, on the bench in front of the dorm.  A girl, a casual friend of mine who lived upstairs, sat down beside me.  She was beautiful, Kathy Ireland if Kathy Ireland didn’t only exist on calendars and in magazines; she had green eyes that would have drove Lo Pan from Big Trouble In Little China batty; looking into them, they drove me batty.  Like a good pop song, her eyes could make you forget just about all of the ill-wills in your life.  That night, on that bench, for me they did just that.  We talked about just enough of nothing that when she walked away I had this overwhelming urge that if I could have just said one more thing to her it would have really been something; the sort of something that shapes futures.

The next day everyone went their separate ways; people moved back home for the summer, to their childhood bedrooms and their jobs and their boyfriends.  I moved across the street into an apartment.  For the first time in my life I was on my own.  I had to grocery shop, and cook.  I had to dust, and do laundry.  I didn’t know how to do most of it; when I attempted to grocery shop, my cart looked like a game of Go Fish gone array; no two things made sense together.  The one thing I learned early on was that freedom wasn’t about not having to wake up at 7:45 am anymore to get to Modern British Literature class on time; freedom was being able to strip down to your boxers immediately upon entering through your front door and not having to worry about picking up those pants until you needed to wear them again.  The first couple of weeks were an adjustment period.  I didn’t have cable: I had eleven DVDs, a few dozen VHS tapes, a couple hundred CDs, and shelves full of books I was finally going to get the chance to read.  At first, I couldn’t find a job.  Then, within the course of two days, I had four of them.  At 5 am I answered Girls Gone Wild and vacuum sealer infomercial calls.  By 2 pm, I was cleaning the hallways of the Hampton Inn.  At 8, I was washing dishes at Ponderosa.  Somewhere in between I tore tickets at the movie theater.  None of them paid particularly well, but they filled time.  When I got out of work I was too exhausted to sleep; I’d cruise along Lake Erie and look out into the vast expanse of the dark water.  When I’d finally get tired, I’d head back home and pass out.  A couple hours later I’d wake up and do it all over again.  In my few minutes of downtime I’d think of her, that smile: my wishing well.  I didn’t hear much from her, but the few words that she wrote me, I clung to them like static electricity.  I knew the power was out, and it was a mute effort to try and find a generator.  But I couldn’t help myself.  In matters of the heart, until I had something new, she was everything I had.  Halfway through the summer I got an email from a friend saying that he was bored at home, that he couldn’t stand the monotony of being in a town where time had passed him by.   I told him to come live with me.  It meant having to give up toiling in my boxers, but it would be nice to have the company.

One night I got home from work and the phone was ringing.  On the other end was voice I knew, but couldn’t quite place.  I tried to play coy, pretend that I knew who she was.  Technically I did, just not right then.  She told me that she was at a party, that I should come.  My roommate, she said he was already there.  I heard him in the background yell, “Come on you bitch!”  I said ok, I’d be there in a few.  When I walked towards the house, a silhouette ran towards me.  It was dark; all I could see were outlines.  Right before impact I saw who the voice was: The girl, my friend with the eyes like pop songs, she reached out me and hugged me for all I was worth.  Tired and grumpy, having tossed so many wheat pennies and Kennedy half-dollars down the wishing well of love, I didn’t feel like I was worth much anymore: “This was my dream, my wish, and I’m taking them back.  I’m taking them all back.” But the smell of her hair, of her skin, exotic and new, it revitalized me; I felt vacuum-sealed, all fresh and new, good to go for months, or at least all-night.  We talked until the sun came up.  We stared at each other for what seemed like—and very well could have been—hours, each looking for the other to make the first move.  That morning ended just as the night hours before had begun, with a hug; nothing more, and nothing less.

Short on air conditioning and heavy with perspiration my friend and I spent a good amount of time that summer at the campus library.  We’d sit at the computer for hours and read up on world events, or at least get caught up on the box scores.  Email was our lifeline to the outside world; a few days after the all-night talk I got one from the girl.  She had returned home, back to reality and her boyfriend, and she was confused.  She and her boyfriend were having problems, serious problems, and I, through our conversation, had helped open her eyes to the fact that some things needed to change if she was going to be happy.  Her email told me that I really made her happy, and because of that, she was sad.  She wanted to tell me everything that she wanted to say, but she couldn’t.  She wanted everything that she wanted to say to come out perfect, but she knew it wouldn’t.  None of it mattered, as confused as she was, as confused as her email made me, I was in serious lust.  I wrote her back quickly before I had time to over-think what I was saying.  I hit the “Send” button and went on to the next email, trying my best to freak out that I said something wrong, or stupid, or both.  The next two emails were from a girl who, though we didn’t really know each other too well, from before the time we first met people thought we’d be kindred spirits.  Both of us were thinkers—over-thinkers most of the time—and we both loved to write.  She was mutual friends with the bright-eyed girl I was now in lust with, and she also just happened to be the ex-girlfriend of my friend and roommate.  Her first email was a sort of catch up, telling me how her summer was going, the guy she was interested in, the guy sitting next to me that she was interested in finally getting over.  The second email was the lyrics to a song, “Your House” by Jimmy Eat World.  I had briefly backed into Jimmy Eat World’s music in high school but not hard enough for it to stick.  But as I read over the lyrics I knew this was a song I had to hear:

“Well, I throw away everything I’ve written you, oh

Anything to just keep my mind from thinking

How I had you once, oh, I can’t forget that

Sometimes I wish I could lose you again.

You’re winning me over

With everything you say

You rip my heart right out, you rip my heart right out

When I let you closer, I only want you closer

You rip my heart right out.”

Good pop songs are like good lovers; they change you.  The only real difference is that good pop songs last a lifetime where good lovers, they tend to come with expiration dates.  A good lover will make you remember every mistake you’ve ever made with the last good lover you had.  A good pop song, if you let it be, it’s like a time machine; it’ll rewrite the history you’ve tried so hard to forget.  Though I hadn’t physically heard it yet I already knew “Your House” was a good pop song; I knew exactly what this dude had gone through by reading the words.  The “Sometimes I wish I could lose you again” slayed me; a tad Whoa is me or not, this was brutal and brilliant and honest.  The next day I went to Best Buy and bought Bleed American and from the first slap of the drum on the title song I was in love; I knew this album was going to change me.  Before that afternoon, through all of the years since, you can count on one hand how many times I’ve felt that way about an album so quickly.  Bleed American was one of them.

Every day brought another round of emails.  Within the first couple days it was clear to me that the girl I was in lust with, she was in lust with me too, despite how much she wrote about wanting to try and work things out with her boyfriend if for no other reason—really, the only reason she mentioned— because of the time they had invested in each other.  I could do without the boyfriend part, and the mortgage rate rationale she was using was lame, but everything else about the emails, how I’d feel after reading them, it was like a high; I got addicted.  From a purely vain standpoint this girl was beautiful, hot even, a catch all of my friends would be jealous of, and yeah, the prospect of that coming becoming reality meant something to me.  Not everything, but something.  And it boosted my self-esteem; I might have been completely inept at buying groceries and mixing whites and colored laundry, but damn, a hot girl liked me.    I’d listen to “A Praise Chorus” and think of her, of the possibilities:

“I’m on my feet, I’m on the floor, I’m good to go.

Well all I need is just to hear a song I know.

I wanna always feel like part of this was mine.

I wanna to fall in love tonight.”

After listening to “A Praise Chorus” the prospect of love seemed redeeming again.  Somehow the song made the world seem smaller, easier to navigate.  It’s refreshing, the way good pop songs are like the gunshot to start a race; from the opening BANG! its game on, balls-to-the-wall fun; it’s almost like getting the chance to be naïve again each time you listen, before life starting bringing you lemons, and “It’s not you, it’s me” endearments.

The last email I’d read each day was from my other friend, the kindred spirit.  We would share stories of our past failures, we’d trade obscure quotes, we wouldn’t try to dance around the things or subjects that seemingly everyone else in our lives all too quickly wanted to dance around.  We could talk about a song like “If You Don’t, Don’t” with lines such as, “And I’m sorry that I’m such a mess/I drank all my money could get/I took everything you let me have/And then I never loved you back,” and without saying too much we knew that lines like these were meant for people like us; we weren’t the ones writing these songs, we were the ones a song like this was being written about.  There’s a certain bond with people of this disposition, whether it’s that misery loves company, the fact that you’re perpetual sad bastards, or something else.  Her emails always left me feeling smarter; I’d always walk away with the urge to write, or read, or sift through volumes of famous quotations to try and find one she’d get a kick out of.

As the summer bore to a close the anticipation was reaching a climax; it looked more and more like I’d get a shot at Ms. Green Eyes.  I organized a giant “Welcome Back” party the night everyone was moving back to school.  Really, I was just using the party as an excuse to see her.  Everyone at the party could see my excitement.  Every time someone knocked at the door I’d hurdle people to open it.  One knock, I ran over, and went to peek out the peep hole but someone had it covered.  Convinced it was her I swung the door open.  It was my ex-girlfriend.  My heart dropped; the room fell silent; everyone sitting behind me could see through me, the look on my face.  I hadn’t really thought of her much that summer but just like, there she was, and just like that, the feelings started coming back.  We went into my room and sat down on the bed.  “I missed you,” she said, and leaned in to hug me.  “I missed you too,” I said, giving in to the hug.  She asked how my summer was, what I had been up to.  I gave her one-word answers, trying my best to be rude without making it seem like I was being rude.  I started looking over my shoulder, worried that the girl I really wanted to be sitting on my bed with would walk in, see me sitting there with someone else, and leave; a half-summer worth of work and excitement, uneventfully destroyed, like a limp bottle rocket.  “Did you listen to any good music this summer?” she asked.  “Yeah,” I answered, “Jimmy Eat World.”  “Ah,” she said, “they suck.”

Her answer was the perfect summation of everything that had happened between us, our relationship.  The things I liked the most, she didn’t.  The music I really loved, she hated.  We would try to make compromises with each other but they only lasted so long; we were like two dogs who kept crapping on each other’s carpet, neither missing the opportunity to rub each other’s nose in their mistake.  I could see the floodgates threatening to open again; I was trying my best to keep them at bay.  I didn’t want to still love her; I was better than that, but it was a hard fight.  I could hear “Your House” playing from the other room.  It was poetic injustice, but it fit.  She left a couple minutes later, one last hug to make up for a summer void of them.  When I walked out of my room the she was standing there; the one I was waiting for.  I missed her entrance; she missed the excitement I’d been wearing on my face for a month and a half, which I promised her would be there.  She looked good, damn good, and for a minute I was right back to being the guy behind all of those emails.  We sat on my bed and looked at everything but each other.  After we couldn’t avoid it anymore I took her hand, leaned in, and kissed her.  This girl—this goddess—that I’d been dreaming of since I first saw her, since the moment we first sat together on that bench all of those months before, it was the worst kiss of my life.  We spent the night together; after all of the things we shared in between our last face-to-face, everything short of saying, “I love you” to each other, we thought we owed each other as much.  But it was a disaster.

The night after, I sat on my floor and listened to “My Sundown,” Bleed American’s closer, for a solid hour, over and over, trying to make peace with the failure.

“Good, goodbye, lovely time

Good, goodbye, tin sunshine

Good, goodbye, I’ll be fine

Good, goodbye, good, goodnight.”

The song is a perfect ending to a near-perfect album full of standout pop songs, and that night it was enough to help me to put everything in perspective.  Hope is a powerful emotion to harness, and for a while there, my hope was gone.  I’d given up on love, and I was pretty sure it had given up on me.  She helped me regain a sense of worth; a modicum of pride in myself, that I would have something to offer someone of the opposite sex, who hopefully would feel the same way about me, if I gave it an honest chance.

“Are you listening? Wooooooooah!”

A month later the girl who’d sent me the song lyrics for “Your House” in the first of many eye-opening emails that summer, she opened my eyes to one more thing; the fact that she liked me.

“Sing it back, Woooooooooooah!”

I was spinning free, with a sweet and simple numbing me all over again.