“I had no voice to talk with because she was my whole language.”

“Falling in love with Renee was not the kind of thing you walk away from in one piece. I had no chance. She put a hitch in my git-a-long.”

“Renée and I met at a bar called the Eastern Standard in Charlottesville, Virginia. I had just moved there to study English in grad school. Renée was a fiction writer in the MFA program. I was sitting with my poet friend Chris in a table in the back, when I fell under the spell of Renée’s bourbon-baked voice. The bartender put on Big Star’s Radio City. Renée was the only other person in the room who perked up. We started talking about how much we loved Big Star. It turned out we had the same favorite Big Star song – the acoustic ballad Thirteen. She’d never heard their third album, Sister Lovers. So naturally, I told her the same thing I’d told every other woman I’d ever fallen for: “I’ll make you a tape!”

“I was too scared to talk, but I was more scared to not talk.”

“Before I met Maria, I was your basic craven hermit. I spent most of my time in my room, in love with my walls, hiding out from the world with myfanzines and my records. I thought I was happier that way. I had developed these monastic habits to protect myself from something, probably, butwhatever it was, the monastic habits had turned into the bigger problem. In my headphones, I led a life of romance and incident and intrigue, noneof which had anything to do with the world outside my Walkman. I was an English major, obsessed with Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater and AlgernonSwinburne, thrilling to the exploits of my decadent aesthete poet idols, even though my only experience with decadence was reading about it.”

“I thought, there is nowhere else in the universe I would rather be at this moment... There is nowhere else I could imagine wanting to be besides here in this car, with this girl, on this road, listening to this song. If she breaks my heart, no matter what hell she puts me through, I can say it was worth it, just because of right now. Out the window is a blur and all I can really hear is this girl's hair flapping in the wind, and maybe if we drive fast enough the universe will lose track of us and forget to stick us somewhere else.”

“One day, you're in a physical landscape you share with this bizarre and fundamentally alien creature, not alien because she's female but alien because you're a fool in love and there's nothing not alien about that. And then when she's gone, you're alone and all the strangeness and wonder have gone out of the landscape and you're still a fool but now nobody notices how many days in a row you wear the same socks and cleaning the shower doesn't make the girl smile anymore so everything smells a little worse and doesn't get fixed when it breaks. I missed the feminine touch—not just hers, but mine. I missed being half-boy, half-girl, part of a whole. Now that I was male in a male environment, it was harder to manifest her physical chick presence, no matter how many of her MAC lipsticks I set out on the coffee table in a basket like so many M&Ms.”