I always keep one CD in my car for driving music. Since I’m slightly obsessive-compulsive, I listen to each driving CD for approximately three or four months, belting the lyrics out with the windows down, until the songs have been thoroughly implanted in my brain. As a result, certain albums have a distinct timestamp; they totally (and sometimes painfully) track the events of my life, all punctuated by a drive to or from somewhere.

In April I made a new friend. He was a shocking, instant friend, so it was immediately clear that I would have problems, as the only other instant friends I’d made turned into boyfriends. Long-term ones, the break-your-heart-into-a-thousand-pieces-and-wanna-die kind. But he didn’t seem interested in me that way, and I had recently broken up with a long-distance boyfriend who was halfway across the country in grad school. I was emotionally unavailable. He was just plain unavailable. I thought I might be safe with this combination. Friends.

I happily drove down a dark country road one night after a conversation about movies had turned into a “come over and watch this movie” invitation. In my car, the Mountain Goats’ “Letter from Belgium” from the album We Shall All Be Healed was playing. Having recently graduated from college, having recently started living alone for the first time in over a year, having just barely started to consider the fact that, yes, I would have to find something to do with my life for the next sixty years or so, I felt the need for healing. The drive to my friend’s house was almost a half an hour, plenty of time to sing these lyrics like a hymn into the night air so fresh and raw it almost bled:

“Yeah we’re all here / Chewing our tongues off / Waiting for the fever to break”

I pulled into his apartment complex sometime around seven at night. The fever broke. I left at six, as the sun was coming up. What had started as an awkward conversation after the movie ended turned us into what the kids these days call, I suppose, “friends with benefits.” Loneliness can do odd and fantastic things to a person, especially at night. And so after that evening, more often than not, I would make the half-hour drive down a dark country road, always with the same song by the Mountain Goats playing.

“In the cold clear light of day down here / Everyone’s a monster. / That’s cool with all of us / We’ve been past the point of help since early April.”

I was a sucker for the song, not only because it spoke to the part of me that adores coming-of-age anthems, but because that month was actually April! I’m also a sucker for coincidence without actually believing in it. When it comes along, you have to play it up, acknowledge it, or it goes away. It was April and we were past the point of help until August, we knew. That’s when I was leaving.

For the next four months, we settled into a nice routine: “You wanna come over and watch something?” “Yeah.”

And we’d watch movies, listen to music, fool around. I was introduced to heavy metal, industrial rock and Japanese pop bands, and those were often the background music to whatever we were doing that wasn’t watching a movie. But the music from this period of my life was persistently, undeniably, that song by the Mountain Goats. Over and over. Sometimes when I left his place at four or five in the morning, I’d sit in my car before driving home. Just for a few minutes. Sometimes it would be because I had fallen asleep on his couch and needed to wake up before attempting to drive. But sometimes it would be to shed a few silly tears because he had woken me up instead of letting me sleep over. I knew this was becoming a problem. I knew I’d never be able to listen to “Letter from Belgium” again, at least not without a significant amount of unrequited longing. That didn’t stop me from playing the song nonstop until August. If anything, I knew this was an era with an end. So I should let the music play out until that end.

The night before I drove a moving van across the country I went to his place to watch a movie and take a break from packing. We went out for ice cream, watched two movies, fooled around. It took a while to say goodbye, mainly because it was so damn weird. For over four months we had seen each other almost every day; we’d become real friends. And now? Sudden, drastic distance. No more late night chats that turned into late night visits that turned into late night…. My heart was breaking but I was determined not to cry in front of him, let him know how I felt, ruin the friendship. We hugged. I walked out to my car. Of course I cried. And then, for the final time, I started my car and pulled away from his apartment. Rubbing a hand quickly over my wet face, I started on the long drive down a country road. Turned my stereo on. Drove. Waiting for the fever to break.