I am standing in the back of a concert hall that my roommate Paul has dragged me to. BrokeNCYDE is playing and stupid white kids are throwing themselves around in a loose circle like the music is poignant or respectable in some conceivably legitimate way. I close my eyes and think of the mid-western bands I’ve come to relate to: Braid, The Promise Ring, more recently Joie de Vivre, and all things Kinsella. I momentarily worry whether or not I am becoming a music snob but remember where I am and who these people are and feel both better and worse simultaneously. When we get home, Paul is going to want to talk about the show for hours, probably all night. I am not prepared for this. I pull a tic tacs container filled with Vicodin from my pocket and pop two as casually as I can. I run a hand down my shirt and adjust my belt buckle. I scratch my shin with my foot. This band is the clamato juice of music and I feel I am either going to have a nose bleed or go blind.

     I walk out and sit on the steps leading up to the venue, finally able to enjoy my ever-increasing mellow. I don’t know where Paul is and I don’t really care. Traffic is thin for a Saturday night. A girl comes out behind me after a few minutes. The door slowly closes behind her and the shrieking brats inside fade to a dull hum. She lights up a cigarette and throws surreptitious glances in my direction. I ask her if I can bum one and she says sure. I tell her she can sit down so she sits next to me, one step below. We listen as two kids walk slowly by on the sidewalk talking about psychiatry. The tall one is giving a vainglorious lecture about altruism and how he’s helped people turn their lives around, saved them from life threatening decisions out of the kindness of his own heart, his broad and bottomless concern for the whole of humanity, et cetera. The shorter one just nods and smiles and claps the tall one on his back while he makes subtle gestures with his long hands to accent the grandiose claims of unabashed selflessness. I look over at the girl next to me.

     “You catch any of that?”

     “Sounds like a bunch of masturbatory dog shit.”

     “I think most people have the power to solve their own problems, but don’t. They want someone to set the ultimatum so they don’t have to be alone when they make their inevitable failures, their… self-fulfilling prophecies.”

     She nods real slow and takes a drag off her cigarette, narrowing her eyes, “Yeah. Fuck people,” and grins a little.

     The dull aching throb of the music muffled behind the door at our back falls attune with my own broken pulse, harmonizing, and the night becomes a symphony of smoke and jagged cynicism. It is at this moment I realize she is the girl I will marry.