I picked that song. Stipe had never convinced me as a deliverer, as a singer who could offer deliverance, until he lost his own religion. I mean, “Stand”? Let’s have a silly stripped-down hoedown and clap ourselves on our ironic backs. But “Losing My Religion” – I heard it first on the McKay bridge, stuck in transit traffic, looking out over the dredged Halifax harbour, wondering if I could survive and if you were part of that survival. It came on after “Thunderstruck” by AC/DC, and I would have changed the station but for the Camaro next to me, windows down and the stereo system inevitable

Yeah, it’s alright, yeah, doing fine

and I thought of unironic lyrics and steeringwheel-thumpiness and all those dressing rooms, long ago, playing hockey and getting psyched, the guy with the ghetto-blaster rewinding the cassette at the end of that fucking song and again, man, again. For the guy next to me, there was always again.

But me, I was a last-chance man. The Dean had said no more, and, scrutinized, I was keeping to this regime. No more telling superiors I had strangled my baby brother with a pillow. No more lateness. No more reflexive defiance. They wanted no more of me, and they expected no more.

I found you on the cusp of a decision, I found you on the cusp of a song, I found you for the wrong reason: survival. We met in a bar, and the old Eagles covers worked well. Who knew what you wanted from me? Probably more, but I was unaccustomed to that, and when the bad band stopped playing, we resolved to meet, again.

I was listening to Michael discover passion, I was listening to him assume the song like an assumption, I listened to him offer up stigmata. The sun was at seven o’clock and traffic was doomed for another hour, and the Camaro had inched ahead of me, and there’s something about mandolins, jangly and surprising. I immediately thought Michael was talking about a crisis of faith, about becoming an atheist, and I sympathized. I took the literal meaning, as we all do the first time we hear a song, too jaded to believe in rock poetry.

But that song kept coming back, it kept playing, and you and I heard it often in bars, and often on the radio, and often on the television. We made love during the performance on Saturday Night Live and it became our song. Michael with his hat. I wanted to love, and I did love, though by that time I had learned a few things about the song. I have to admit that as we lay together I mouthed the words to the song, and I knew what they meant, and I felt that they were inevitable.

So, first I listened to the song for pleasure; later I turned to it for prophecy; still later I turned to it for comfort (things coming true has a nice tidy feel); and now I avoid it. Why?

On our wedding night we slow-danced to it, and by that time I couldn’t tell if you were like me on the bridge: if you knew what the song meant, and you were, in your own way, thumping the steering wheel. But I barely cared, because by this point I was in the prophecy phase and though I had survived, I had to complete the arc, I had to sail through the song. Why itemize what went wrong? We both know, and it’s more than a song, more than a band. Let’s just say that defiance is a brand of self-destruction.

When you were gone I turned to the song, of course. The mesmerizing mandolins, Stipe’s suddenly sagacious voice. I saw deeply into our relationship, and there was no blame. Who can blame a story? But the feeling mattered, that feeling of foregone loss, the longing-after and losing. Soon I couldn’t listen to anything else.

All of which meant that I wanted you back. Listening to the song meant wanting you back, which was odd, because in the very beginning I had listened to it because I wanted you, and then I listened to it as a kind of black prank, playing a song that predicted divorce at our wedding. And then I listened to it over and over, hitting replay on the stereo, again.

I can’t listen to it any more. I haven’t found anyone else, and there is no other anthem or love to replace you. The song still moves me, even after a thousand listenings. The problem is there was a lesson to learn: the dean, you, Michael, all trying to tell me that love is where you find it, that defiance is a deformation of love, that life is bigger. And it hurt me to listen to it before, it hurt every time, even on the bridge, but now it hurts too much, and I need no reminder of you, better than any picture, better than any shopworn memory.

I see that Camaro pulling ahead. I remember pulling up your veil. Even the pseudo-Eagles who serenaded us, I remember them too (their name: the Jasons). I remember the drunken heckler who screamed his request for Neil Young songs all night. But I don’t remember the song; I leave that for the song, and when I hear it, which is unavoidable, I remember wanting you and thinking not of prophecy or opposition, of losing my religion.