“Crash into Me” has been stalking me for years. This started back in 1996, when the song came out. I loved it. It made me feel woozy and squishy inside, and in all my eighteen-year-old wishing-for-story-book-romance glory, I wanted someone to crash into me.

And I finally met him. Little did I know, in all my nineteen-year-old incredibly-bad-judge-of-character way, that my new boyfriend was a complete nutjob. My friends and family hated him, but I thought he was just misunderstood. Crazy, in a funny way. An exciting way. He was different; he was exactly what I was looking for. So I moved with him to a place three thousand miles away from everyone I knew, because I thought I loved him (okay, maybe I was just stupid). The song followed us. Whenever I heard it, I felt so happy that I finally had someone to crash into. He benevolently dubbed it “our song,” and of course I was perfectly fine with that.

Then the honeymoon period ended, and along came the days of boredom and irritation with his habits that I once found endearing and cute. Like his habit of getting fired from jobs because he was “misunderstood” and “unappreciated” (yes, I already mentioned that I may have been stupid to move in with him). According to him, he was a special kind of genius: one that might be considered insane by others, but “they’re all sleepwalkers anyway.” His words, folks, not mine. Through all the eviction notices, late-night fights over his paranoid suspicions of my philandering, and other not-so-small signs that he was beginning the downward descent into the pits of schizophrenic hell, the song played on. It played in every mall, on every radio station, in every elevator I ever stood in. I began cringing every time I heard it, because it was still our song. And he was still insane.

Flash forward a few years, to my new relationship. I had left the loon, and that horrid song, three thousand miles away and was happy with my new man. My sane new man, whose favorite band just happened to be the Dave Matthews Band. Oh joy! “Crash into Me” began stalking me all over again. I got to hear that song over and over, in his bedroom, in his car, on his guitar that he would gently strum, trying to seduce me. I was beyond cringing; by now it had developed into outright repulsion. “Craaash… in… to… meeeee… yeah…” I decided that I would never crash into anyone with Dave Matthews playing in the background ever again, and I often dream of crashing my foot into Dave Matthews’ smug ass for having written that song.