Thursday, Oct. 21, 2004
Damned Dar Williams, posted at 7:54 p.m.
Epiphany in Baltimore has moved to epiphanyinbaltimore.blogspot.com So I guess I'm sort of glad that the Red Sox won. It's hard to begrudge a team that came back from that far down, and I even got a little emotional watching the final celebration. I wore my Boston tie to school today, and am even a little bit ready to admit that part of my disdain for the Red Sox is thinly disguised jealousy that I hold for the sea of Red Sox fans that swarm around me.***
I should really learn to stop listening to Dar Williams in the car. I put her on tonight when I decided to take a break from the noisy new Mos Def album, and... wow. I'm immediately brought back to the time when the girl who broke my heart and I went to her show in Ann Arbor. No other music can inixtricably connect to another person as much as Dar does to this girl. As soon as I hear the weepy steel guitars in "Iowa," I think of her liking that song better than "February," and me disagreeing, and having an argument I can have with almost no other soul on this planet.
I caught myself thinking about her earlier this week, when I stumbled upon a mutual friend's blog. To say he's a mutual friend is probably a mistatement. I like the guy, but haven't spoken to him in years, and they very well might still be close. Anyhow, this is what he said on Feb. 21, 2003: I would imagine another reason I am feeling so nastalgic is that I know Kelly is going through a really tough time right now. The boy who she has wanted for years, the one who just admitted that he liked her too, moved on and continues with his string of hookups. How do you explain to someone that the relationship they want so badly isn't going to happen and there is nothing they can do about it?
The boy in question is me, the hookups are completely fabricated, and there was plenty she could have done about it. Like, for example, pick up a fucking phone. I still can't figure out what really happened, and I take from the whole experience simply the lesson that human beings can do a lot of things to hurt each other, and she certainly hurt me a great deal. I still don't understand half of it, and it gets me into such tangled up emotion inside that I don't like to think about it. Dar makes me, though.
She sent me a card a year ago when I had my surgeries, and I thought we might be able to be friends again. She was a great friend. But we had an e-mail communication this spring that I ended without warning. After no hint of an apology in her e-mails, and a disappointing small talk tone to her correspondence, I sort of had an epiphany (in Baltimore) that I don't need someone who caused me such pain in my life. Why should I put myself in that position to let her hurt me again? What if I don't even like the person she's become, who seemed, with her in-your-face Christianity, on the surface to be a much different person than I had fallen for, of the person who was probably the closest friend I ever had? I decided not to chance it, and stopped communication.
But the journey of a person from someone you know to someone you used to know is a long, troubled one, and I'm still waiting for my eternal sunshine on a spotless mind. Dar Williams does not help.