“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!”

“The radio tape puts you right back in the original time and place when you first heard the songs. You arethere, my friend.”

“Her universe is such a big place full of so many galaxies-100 billion of them with 100 billion stars apiece which means 10 to the 22nd power stars-that it’s terrifying to think of the odds that we found each other. We want to freeze the perfect moment hold on to it at least long enough to understand it. But it dances on with us or without us so we jump in and try to keep up. The universe is expanding and we are just two of a billion stars.”

“Neither of us ever threw anything away. We madea lot of mix tapes while we were together. Tapes for making out, tapes for dancing, tapes for falling asleep. Tapes for doing the dishes, for walkingthe dog. I kept them all. I have them piled up on my bookshelves, spilling out of my kitchen cabinets, scattered all over the bedroom floor. I don’teven have pots or pans in my kitchen, just that old boom-box on the counter, next to the sink. So many tapes.”

“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 was reading a poem by my idol, Wallace Stevens, in which he said, ‘The self is a cloister of remembered sounds.’ My first response was, Yesss! How did he know that? It’s like he’s reading my mind. But my second response was, I need some new sounds to remember. I’ve been stuck in my little isolation chamber for so long I’m spinning through the same sounds I’ve been hearing in my head all my life. If I go on this way, I’ll get old too fast, without remembering any more sounds than I already know now. The only one who remembers any of my sounds is me. How do you turn down the volume on your personal-drama earphones and learn how to listen to other people? How do you jump off one moving train, marked Yourself, and jump onto a train moving in the opposite direction, marked Everybody Else? I loved a Modern Lovers song called, ‘Don’t Let Our Youth Go to Waste,’ and I didn’t want to waste mine.”

“Not being able to protect her from things was the most frightening thing I'd ever felt, and it kicked in as soon as we got together. With every year we spent together, I became more conscious that I now had an infinitely expanding number of reasons to be afraid. I had something to lose.”