"I don't think that this is love at all (not anymore)"

For a while, I couldn't listen to Travis' Good Feeling. Hearing "More than us" would take me back to that one summer night when I was driving home, the windows down and the air drying my tear-stained cheeks. All I could think about was how she was such a bitch and how he was such a bastard and, boy, do they deserve each other. "I wish that I could fly fly fly away" because I didn't really want to hang around her all summer and hear her talk about them because they were the couple now. I'd turn onto a street and the words would still chase me down "not anymore, ohh". To make things worse, it started to rain again and I couldn't see clearly to begin with. I was so close to pulling over, but I kept driving. I knew that if I stopped, I would've just collapsed onto the steering wheel like you see in the movies, sobbing and being an awful mess. Nobody would be there to hand me a tissue. I'd have to drag my nose against my bare arm (I was wearing this ridiculously teeny tanktop ... it was hot, after all) and I'd have to talk myself through it, all the while listening to "When I got outside, I thought of you again" and just wanting to die or punch somebody in the nose.

And then there was Guster, "Mona Lisa" particularly. That one night when I sang "Fa fa" in his room with him (it was so cramped and not at all what I thought it would be, but he had like 100 CDs)? And when he coyly went through his closet, handed me his soccer jersey and said, point-blank, "You should wear this tomorrow"? That's been burned in my memory, unfortunately, because he was just that type of guy in high school than you pine after and never get. The type who walked by, surrounded by 18 girls, and 20 others would be swooning after him, and then 43 others in a protective circle around him, because they "liked him since grade school". I couldn't listen to "never be the same again" because I really didn't think I could be. It was playing this other night, when he was massaging my ankles and playing with my shoe laces and tying them together, and then untying them later again because he really didn't want me to trip. It was after, of all things, a Travis show, and when they played "The Fear" (which they NEVER play live) we just put our arms around each other and swayed to the music, looking like big dorks probably, but I didn't care.

So now I can obviously enjoy these two bands without going fetal because (and I never thought it would happen) I got over it. Some nights though, I pick up that one hitch in Fran Healy's voice and remember where and when I was when I first caught it. And then it all rushes through me again, those crazy hybrid of emotions that you feel when something awful just happened. The song ends and something lingers for a while (... his smile his eyes the green shirts rolling stone) and then I forget about it, or my mind drifts off to something else, which I am glad for. There is nothing worse than hearing (and having) a broken record (for a brain).