It’s a pretty easy drive from Charlotte to Pittsburgh when you’re listening to the best music you’ve ever heard. The hardest part was saying goodbye to Jodi, maybe forever. It was uncharacteristically cold as I headed north on I-77, out of the placid arms of Carolina. I was hell-bent on becoming acquainted with the rest of my life, but I was driving away from the girl I wanted to spend it with.

For the next seven hours, I listened to only two songs. When I arrived in Pittsburgh, I put them both away and I haven’t revisited either since. Here’s why.

Only a song can bring back somebody’s pulse once it’s gone. It takes you as you are and lets you be exactly who you need to be, but then sometimes the songs we live inside are the same ones that throw grenades over our walls when we start to feel too bulletproof. It’s something both telling and eternal: a good song is timeless. A great one allows you to grow, and in return, the song grows within you. These two songs—these loving, fostering, growing songs—offered fertile ground for a great love to happen. In the end, it was their bittersweet charm that had me pinned against a wall with their hands around my throat. They don’t ask for an explanation. They don’t offer one, either. True, Jodi and I may have folded in the face of February’s finest bluff, but it was the songs that disappointed me. Their unconditional love was far too honest to handle. And the one person that could make it all better was the one I left in Charlotte.

In 1998, Counting Crows released the double-live album Across a Wire: Live in New York. Over two separate nights in the sleepless city, the Crows performed (and recorded) two concerts: one for MTV’s Live From The 10 Spot, the other for VH1’s Storytellers. Both performances are transcendent, especially when you’re 452 miles away from a clock that works and your heart, frostbitten, won’t let you feel anything, not even pain.

The last song on the 10 Spot disc is “Walkaways,” an unimposing 64-second nod to a dynamic relationship that—for whatever reason—had to end. Originally released on the Crows’ sophomore album, Recovering the Satellites, it provides twenty bars of space for a great love to be laid quietly to rest. It was a perfect way to end the night; it was also a song that made heading north seem tolerable.

I had heard “Walkaways” hundreds of (thousands of) millions of times before. Every time I did, it surprised me—like the reflection that scares you when you walk past a mirror you didn’t know was there. I never really knew what the song actually felt like, though, until I heard it that morning in my car and the world went silent. In my head, over and over, a restless conversation trapped inside the walls of a song. It’s a funny thing about Adam Duritz: when he sings the lyric, Someday, I’m gonna stay, you almost believe him.

I didn’t sing along. I just listened.

* * *

It’s almost April now in western Pennsylvania. It’s a time I’ve grown to love, because it seems we’re all on fire for something. This year, though, I’ll be facing my first spring without Joe Purdy’s “Julie Blue,” the second of the two songs I retired after my drive from Charlotte. Like “Walkaways,” it’s a perfectly bittersweet song to sing to yourself once all the sad ones in the jukebox have taken your money and the bartender has made last call. At forty-five seconds long, suffice to say it won’t hinder your late-night Taco Bell run, either.

Purdy’s voice, whiskey-drenched and tired, is something not easily forgotten, especially in the company of a weathered acoustic guitar. For three hours and fifty-one minutes, from the southern tip of West Virginia to the open mouth of Pennsylvania, I listened to the saddest song ever written:

River girl, she took me in.
I became her new best friend.
She would laugh as she filled my glass of wine.

I’m singing’ goodbye, River, I’ll see you some time.

It was then that I began to see the trend: the idea that there will always be “some day.”

For four and a half years, the thing Jodi and I did best was use the word “someday.” It was a Get Out of Jail Free card, of sorts, because it was always the easiest thing to say.

“Someday, when we’re rich…”

“Someday, when we’re married…”

Someday this, some day that. It was always “someday.”

Well, someday never came. Didn’t call. Didn’t write. Just never showed up. Maybe someday there will be a place for “someday,” but not today.

Coincidentally (or maybe not), I drove away from Jodi with two unforgettable songs, songs I love and no longer listen to. Written by very different writers, they’re both infinitely lonely, each occupying a miniscule corner of this big blue earth. They’re less than two minutes of playing time that echo this sentiment of “someday” as loud as any songs ever did.

In life, in love, in music, the good ones go so fast.