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.” “
