Love Is a Mix Tape

I was helpless in trying to return people’s kindness, but also helpless to resist it. Kindness is a scarier force than cruelty, that’s for sure. Cruelty isn’t that hard to understand. I had no trouble comprehending why the phone company wanted to screw me over; they just wanted to steal some money, it was nothing personal. That’s the way of the world. It made me mad, but it didn’t make me feel stupid. If anything, it flattered my intelligence. Accepting all that kindness, though, made me feel stupid.

I knew I would have to relearn how to listen to music, and that some of the music we’d loved together I’d never be able to hear again.

“Take this, all of you, and rock. This is the blood of the new and everlasting covenant. It will be shed for you, and for all who rock, so that rock may be worshiped and glorified.”

I realize that I will never fully understand the millions of bizarre ways that music brings people together

man, all the people I get to hear this song with, we’re going to miss each other when we die.

But all the things you want to learn from grief turn out to be the total opposite of what you actually learn.

Another thing only country singers understand. One day, you’re in a physical landscape you share with this bizarre and fundamentally alien creature, not alien because she’s female but alien because you’re a fool in love and there’s nothing not alien about that. And then when she’s gone, you’re alone and all the strangeness and wonder have gone out of the landscape and you’re still a fool but now nobody notices how many days in a row you wear the same socks and cleaning the shower doesn’t make the girl smile anymore so everything smells a little worse and doesn’t get fixed when it breaks. Like Johnny Paycheck, I missed the feminine touch—not just hers, but mine.

night, I sat in the same chair in a different backyard, staring all night into different woods, except nothing I saw there had any good news to tell me about the future.

Words I said out loud, every day, many times a day, for years and years—suddenly they were dust in my mouth.

I had no voice to talk with because she was my whole language. Without her to talk to, there was nothing to say.