1 February 2002
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TGIF, y'all. Thank goodness it's February. I don't know why January was so crappy, but it was. There was work mumbo jumbo, and just the general winter malaise I suppose. I've never liked the first month of the year much. Surely I'm not alone in this, right? But now it's February and Spring gleams and beckons. Too bad winter once again reigns supreme across the land. Not that February is often any better for one's self esteem. What with the infliction of Valentine's Day and all. Did you know that the last VDay I had a boyfriend Scream had just opened? That is, in fact, what we saw that weekend. Do your own math. And winter often makes me sort of a Sad Sally anyway and when I get sad I'm wont to just make a whole day of it. Break out the old journals and tear trigger songs and just wrap it all around me. Out of nowhere the other day, I heard an old Sarah McLachlan song and it switched on all these old memories and emotions of my college love. After I'd called him that summer night and told him that I wanted to see other people. After he asked me, voice breaking, if I already was. After I'd had to say yes, I, in the great tradition of college emotions everywhere, made him a mix tape. I made it because I didn't know how to tell him all the things I wanted to say, so I found songs that said it for me. (It's obviously something I do a lot.) I sat on the floor of my summer house with my CDs spread out and my 'dorm stereo' next to me and put everything out there on this one tape. Then, on the inner cover, I wrote the main lyrics I wanted him to get from each song. Like, with Sarah's Adia: "Adia, I do believe I've failed you. Adia, I know I've let you down. But you know I've tried so hard to love you in my way." And I cried and I cried and prayed that he'd hear me and finally get why I'd done what I did, and that I loved him and could we please work this out? There was a lot of Sarah McLachlan's Surfacing on that tape. Like Do what you have to do: "I have the sense to recognize that I don't know how to let you go." And songs from his favorite band, Toad the Wet Sprocket. Coil, their final CD, was released that summer, and it seemed as if we'd listened to it a million times. I'd laid in his high school bed, beneath the bookcase where he kept his prom king crown and first pair of drumsticks, as he kissed behind my ear, their music our anthem. We'd driven from Fairfax to Ocean City and played "Little Man Big Man" over and over. "You're going to make me sick of this song!" he'd told me, rolling down the window, caressing the wind with his drummer's hands. I thought if I included those lyrics that he'd remember too; that he'd feel it and come running back to me. Or rather, let me go running back to him. That he'd hear my apology - "Is it this place that makes me fall from you? Forget the words that once rang so true?" He never mentioned the tape. Not until almost a year later when I went over to his apartment and we awkwardly hung out. He reached up into his closet and pulled out a shoebox from way in the back. He reached into it, this box filled with mementos of me - countless Party Pics and letters - and pulled out my tape. He told me that he'd listened to it over and over. He told me that one summer afternoon while working at the bike shop a coworker had come into the back and found him crying, my tape playing over the store's system. So here I sit tonight, hundreds of nights later, trying to recreate the tape I made so many lonely nights ago. Wondering where it all got me, and what I'm doing now that I'm here. The notify wants you. And the forum wants you too, fool.
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