My date was 6′5″ to my 5′1”. I had met him at a club a couple weeks earlier, when he’d sauntered up next to me at the bar and asked, “Do you ever watch racing?” I didn’t, but I needed someone to talk to. He bought me the rum and Coke that my own ID couldn’t, and he got my phone ringing past ten p.m. for the first time in months.

He was the heir to a real estate fortune and owned three cars. One night, about a week after he’d first called me and another week after he’d gotten over my rejection of a free ticket to a NASCAR event, he arrived at my apartment in a slate-blue Mercedes. He wanted to take me to dinner and a movie, but I started making adjustments to this plan as soon as I met him in the parking lot. I was, perhaps, more sociologically naive than most college juniors. I interpreted being a feminist as being demanding and obstinate while occasionally taking a Gloria Steinem book out of the library. I insisted on driving him to the restaurant in my aging Mazda. He accepted. I unlocked my car.

The passenger seat didn’t scoot back as far as his legs required.

“Are you okay? Comfortable, I mean?” I turned his way but failed to meet his eyes.

“I’m fine.” His voice told me he was smiling. Grinning, even. “Just enjoying the company.”

The Mazda’s engine struggled to come to life, but when it did, my latest mix tape drowned out the chugging of the motor. My pulse quickened. This mix tape, How I Learned To Dance When The Music’s Ended, had been carefully crafted over several nights. The segues were perfect. The therapeutic nature of that tape could not be disputed. Side A was about mourning a past relationship, while side B was about having pride in being sorrowful, pretentious, and lonely. One of the requisite Ani DiFranco songs ended, and then Simon and Garfunkel took over. I had loved their songs ever since the seven-year-old version of myself slipped my dad’s Bridge Over Troubled Water cassette into my Fisher-Price tape player and created predictable choreography to “The Boxer.” But it was “I Am a Rock” that had become my song over the years — the voices melding with the strumming of the guitar, the insistence of the naked drumbeats, the lyrics recalling the John Donne poem I memorized during my last year of high school. The first year I made the decision to be melancholy.

I looked at my date’s face in profile as I drove out of my apartment complex. Did he know the tape was about me? Was he turning each lyric over in his mind, imagining that it must have taken many tear-stained playlist drafts and long conversations over illicit rum and Cokes with my roommates to reach the artistic pinnacle that was the completion of this tape?

He rearranged his legs, knocking aside a stack of books for my child psychology presentation as he did so. “What are we listening to?”

“Just a tape I made,” I said. “Music for driving and stuff, you know?”

He nodded along with the music all the way to the restaurant, a plain old sports bar that could be counted on to serve up a good plate of fried cheese. I told my date this, and he managed to summon two orders of cheese sticks to the table by the time I got back from washing my hands. As we ate, I knew he was studying me — watching my eyes, or maybe the way my mouth smacked open and closed on each cheese stick. There was a trivia contest happening across the bar, and I mumbled my answer to each of the questions. I got all the movie questions right — Sally Field, Dances With Wolves, Marlon Brando — and all the sports questions wrong.

Our gazes met: an accident on my part. My date asked, “So what’s your favorite movie?”

“Sleepless in Seattle.”

“Really?”

“Sure.” Actually, it was West Side Story, but I usually kept that to myself. I always struggled to talk about things I enjoyed very deeply.

He reached across the table and covered the top of my head with one of his hands. “You’ve built a wall around yourself. This high.”

I nodded, or tried to. If I agreed with him, I figured, he would quit psychoanalyzing me.

“I want you to know that I fully intend to get through that barrier.”

I said, “You know that song that was playing on the mix tape in my car — ‘I Am a Rock,’ by Simon and Garfunkel?”

He nodded.

“Well, that’s my theme song. Or at least it has been since November. That line, ‘I have my books and my poetry to protect me’? That’s me, you know.”

“I know,” he said. “But if you’re a rock, then I’m… a hammer. Or maybe a chisel.”

He didn’t try anything on me at the movies. I got to stare at Colin Firth and my date had to be quiet.

The mix tape remained the soundtrack as I drove us back to the parking lot in front of my apartment building. I nosed the Mazda into the spot beside his Mercedes, and I hopped out of the driver’s side as soon as I’d put the engine to rest. Meanwhile, my date struggled with the physics of long legs in a compact car. I was halfway across the parking lot before he managed to get out.

“I enjoyed it!” He waved as though I was being carried away on an ocean liner. “Am I gonna see you again soon?”

“I’ll call you,” I said, though I knew I wouldn’t. Then I hurried up three flights of stairs so I could collapse into my bed, back into myself.

It wasn’t books or poetry protecting me. It wasn’t even that my bedroom was my womb, my tomb. Instead, I was using the song itself as protection – an open invitation to dislike everyone I met, and to dare the unlucky person who bought me a drink to just try to find something palatable about me. It was a trick, of course. There was no way for another person to find the good in me while I spent so much time calculating new ways to isolate myself.

I should have seen it coming, but my poor car had only a few weeks of life left in her. She sputtered to her death on a Georgia highway as I was driving home to see my family for Easter weekend. The last song she played for me was “I Am a Rock.” Then the mix tape squealed and the transmission petered out, and I rolled the car into a gas station on the shreds of momentum built up from traveling at highway speed.

I could have called my tall date. He and I had just met for our last-ever meal together, and I knew he would be heading down the same highway. But I’d never even bothered to commit any of his phone numbers to memory. Instead, I called my dad and summoned him from the Atlanta suburbs out to Winder, Georgia. I left the mix tape in the car for the wrecker truck driver to discover. Then I took a stack of books from the passenger seat and sat on the curb of the gas station, reading about abnormal sexual development.