009. instincts and forethought.
Two and a half years ago, I made a mix cd called “the end of us.” It sounds like this was in response to a breakup, but it actually wasn’t. James and I were still seeing each other, but it’s just how I felt and how the mix came together. I was listening to it in my car as I moved out of the dorms and back into my home. The night he broke up with me, I got in my car to drive to Geoff’s, and it started playing from the cd player once I turned my key in the ignition.
“You change your mind come Monday and turn your back on me. You’ll take your steps away with hesitance; you’ll take your steps away from me.”
“Cautioners.” Jimmy Eat World. Those were the words falling softly out of the speakers, narrating back to me what had just happened in the walls of my house. James had just decided he didn’t want to waste his time, and he walked out of my life. It was a Monday. It was the last day I could call him my best friend and mean it.
At the time I looked at the whole situation with a bitter kind of irony. Of course Jim Adkins would have the words to narrate my life. It’s what Jimmy Eat World had been doing for the last few years of my existence. Of course he would narrate this breakup, and with such perfection. I found it funny, and Geoff and I laughed about it that night while we ate ice cream in the park.
I didn’t cry. Not until I crawled into my bed at 3am, alone. It was then that I let my body succumb to the sobs that had been building over the last 5 hours.
In retrospect, I probably knew that James was going to break up with me. It’s probably why I made the mix “impulsively.” On some level, I was consciously aware of the course our relationship would take. Even so, I don’t think a movie could have planned that moment in my car any better.
This story has a point, I promise.
If you read my last post, then you noticed that it was a list of songs from a mix I called “white noise.” I made that mix the night I couldn’t sleep last week, the night I stayed up worrying about ASU and law school and friends and my life and, most of all, whether the person I was seeing was going to leave me soon. I made the mix so I could put it on and drown out all of my worries with white noise.
Looking back on the songs titles I selected and the overall themes of the music, it seems that I’ve once again managed to forecast the soundtrack to my life. The songs tell the story of the brief kinship we shared better than I could in my own words. Many aren’t literal comparisons, and some only bleed as deep as the song title, but most are more significant than that.
I think I’m telling you this right now because I want to believe on some level that any amount of forethought, no matter how minute, serves to make the aftermath that much easier to swallow.
We lit our Roman candle, and while he thinks the sparks weren’t there or weren’t enough or weren’t right, I think he just turned around before everything fully came to life.
