A Song That Reminds Me of Someone | Words Are Very Unnecessary

Sitting behind the passenger’s seat of the car on that hot day, displaced by the only person who trumped me in the best friend rule, and who I would have gladly given up shotgun for a hundred times out of a hundred anyway, I should’ve already known there was nothing there.

I was seventeen, and I thought I was in love. The fact that I might have no idea what love actually may be never entered my mind; it becomes clear to me later that the reason every teenager makes the same mistakes is because there are certain things you have to experience for yourself. For me, one of those things was hanging myself up on a girl for half a decade.

We’d had the whole relationship in a flash, cycling through the whole process. Meet, flirt, kiss, girlfriend/boyfriend, make out some more, “I love you”… answered with evasion. Too stupid, too soon.

I made promises then that I had no reason to make, no way to know if I could actually keep. Some of them are seared into my mind, repeated so often in memory that I can’t honestly tell you if they truly happened or if I just imagined they should have and made them part of the story. Others are lost entirely to me; in my mind, it is a linear narrative, and when you’re crafting a narrative, it is often best to jettison anything that doesn’t further the plot.

It’s not easy living your life that way. When you expect everything to have exposition followed by rising action followed by climax followed by falling action followed by denouement, it has a way of being self fulfilling.

Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad for someone who also believed in happy endings, but I happen to believe that everyone gets, at most, one of those.

She wasn’t mine.

In the back seat of that car, I put my hands over the seat and on her shoulders when “Enjoy the Silence” came up on whomever’s mixtape was in the deck that night. I sang along with the song, “all I ever wanted, all I ever needed…” and I felt her stiffen and I sat back, in my place, by myself.

That night she pulled me aside and said she wanted to talk to me. I knew what was coming; even then I could read the signs.

And Depeche Mode can take me back to that night any time I’m in the right mood.