The Boy Who Didn't Love Music

Music meant something different to us.

There were people who liked music, who enjoyed it, and that categorized just about everybody in the world. But then.

There were people who loved music. And those people were us.

We weren't typical teenagers. We didn't tune our radios to whatever glorified, synthesized, over-produced and over-publicized hot station that played the latest hits that every teenage girl with a knock-off tacky, canvas Coach purse totally ate up like pancakes piled high with whipped cream, strawberries and syrup. And maybe M&M's. Which incidentally, I hated. Not only because I disliked the candy in general, but because they reminded me of the time that I went to New York City when I was 15 and I went to the M&M store in Times Square, which, admittedly, though I still hated M&M candy, was an amazing place, and a place where I purchased for my 17-year-old boyfriend and bass guitarist/pothead/total failure at life, Mark, a bag of mixed M&M's with all the cool, weird colors which you can't just find in stores, plus, and this was the more meaningful gift, a cereal bowl with the green M&M chick [green M&M's and their correlation to horniness being a joke of ours] on it. Because Mark loved cereal possibly more than any other human being I had ever met.

I thought it was an awesome gift.

I also, in the terrible two months that we dated, gave him an iPod. Granted, it was my old one and it was only a nano without video even,  and it only carried 1000 songs and it had my full name including middle initial engraved on the back and it was lime green.

But it was mine, and I gave it to him, and he didn't have one at all before that, and now he did. Plus he liked lime green. He was that kind of guy. Sexy as hell, straight as hell, maybe even a little too straight sometimes, but flamboyant too, sort of, only he could get away with it.

He used the iPod. Even though it had my name on the back. Even after we broke up. At the time, I was righteously furious that he had the gall to still use it, but at the same time it was a pathetic kind of balm to a severely wounded soul. I don't know if he still uses it. He probably threw out the cereal bowl. I knew it was a lame gift. Except...I had kind of thought it was cool too, sorta.

I mean, I would've liked a gift like that. That was that personalized. Like, for example, I love drinking coffee. And I love The Office, namely, I love Dwight. So a coffee mug with Dwight's face on it would be an awesomely touching, hugely personal, super cool gift. But that's just me.

I guess both those things, the flirtatious M&M cereal bowl and the Dwight coffee mug are just about as lame as I turned out to be.

But I digress.

Back to the music.

That was what it was all about, where we lived. It took center stage in our lives in a way that it didn't the lives on many others our age. We judged a person based on their musical taste. "What kinda music you listen to?"

"Rap, man. Def Leppard sometimes. Led Zeppelin."

"Shit. Wrong answer."



For me, that was an absolute warning sign with a guy. A warning sign signaling the impossiblity of any sort of close bond or relationship.

I mean...sure, real music afficionados believe in general that Led Zeppelin is the bee's knees. I personally think they are SO over-rated. I don't listen to that. I'm over that. I think those guys that are totally obsessed with Zeppelin, Van Halen, and Eric Clapton and all that ridiculous stuff are stuck in the past. And quite honestly I could care less about any of those musicians or bands or any of that type of music. My stuff isn't what I'd refer to as modern, but maybe it's what other people would consider that. But still, a liking for Led Zeppelin was something, for the most part, that I could respect.

As a rule, I was respectful of almost any type of music that someone truly loved, as long as they genuinely liked it, and didn't just listen to what the radio shoveled down their throats, and claim to like it. That shit, all that Daughtry and Dave Matthews and Uncle Kracker, it all sounded the same. Any idiot could claim to like Nickelback. It made me want to puke. That was the music that I couldn't respect. The people I couldn't respect.

But overall, I honestly couldn't find anybody who loved and hated all the right bands. I couldn't find anybody who was my musical soulmate. And that was what I was truly searching for. Because when you live and breathe music, you need somebody who lives and breathes it back, who gets it, who connects on that level. That level that is so much deeper than any other level. Music reacher into the deepest part of me, it wrapped itself around my insides in a way I couldn't really explain to anybody. But I needed it, like a narcotic, like food, like oxygen. I hated to sound cliche, but it was the full truth. A day was not a day without music. Music was everywhere. And I couldn't comprehend ever being with somebody who wasn't obsessed to that extent, who didn't understand that music was the end all and be all and just how truly much it meant to me. I needed a guy who felt the exact same way. And I was willing to spend the rest of my life searching for him.

Meeting Daniel, then, was a surprise. Daniel didn't like any of the music I liked. Mark had been a douche bag, that was for sure, but he had been so sexy and so good with being dorky cute and seductive and using lying words off smooth lips and loving almost all the right music. It had been easy to fall for that.

Daniel was the opposite. He was shy when we met. He wasn't artsy like I was, didn't really appreciate the things that I did. He hated my body which other boys drooled after, he didn't think I was real attractive. He liked baseball and Italian food, movie making, and most of all politics. He was truly nerdy. He was aloof, awkward, sarcastically funny. He wasn't after me. I loved him. He became my best friend.

But I was never in love with him. Oh, we had a relationship deeper than anything I'd ever experienced. We argued and we fought and we lasted through turmoil and distress and me breaking his heart, and a devestating break-up for myself, after which I turned into a total idiotic douche bag and did some awful stupid things and hurt people. Probably hurt him.

We lasted.

But I never thought about loving him because he didn't fit any of the criteria. He didn't look right, didn't have the right sense of humor, the right experience, the right passions, anything. He didn't even play the guitar, or care about playing the guitar. All the boys I dated played the guitar, or were in a band, or were getting high every other night.. Daniel was straight-edge. And so he was just my best friend, who I laughed with and asked advice about boys and teased about silly things like him having a crush on his cousin and blushing really easily and never having a girlfriend and being embarassed about his body in t-shirts.

And worst of all, he didn't love music.

Oh he appreciated it, definitely. He liked it, that wasn't an over-statement. But did he love it, live and breathe it?

Definitely not.

And even the music that he DID love, was so far from my musical soul-mate list that I could've cried.

He made fun of what I liked actually. He hated it. I would try to seduce him with it, try to brainwash him with all the greats, what I considered greats. He would have none of it.

It was all stuff you'd hear on an Oldies station, weird jazz, Du-Wop, barbershop quartet, opera, Paolo Nutini, James Taylor, the Dave Matthews Band, Tom Jones.

It made me want to die inside.

Everytime I got into the passenger seat of his car and Jack Johnson was crooning softly in the background, I could've punched a hole in the window.

But I sucked it up and listened, for the most part, ebcause it was his car, and I respect the right of the driver to have his own music playing.

Even if I happened to hate it with every fiber of my being.

And so for this express reason, I knew Dan could never ever be a person that I would love the way a girl loves a boy.

I loved him as my best friend and as a generally wonderful person.

But as a boy? I couldn't.

He didn't love music.

And so, we pandered this way. In a strange friendship, which sometimes felt like a balancing act, but which meant more to me than I could really say, though I never thought it would go farther.

And then one day, Dan got a girlfriend.

And I realized, in a sort of frightening epiphany, that he had been what I had always wanted. I had always thought, snobbishly, that I could do better. That I was looking for someone very different in every way. But I had never expected Dan to go off and find himself a girlfriend in the midst of our awesome best friend-ship.

I suddenly became petrified. It became very clear to me very quickly that Dan was very different than me in the sense that HIS relationship actually had the potential, and more than that, the likelihood, to last.

As none of mine ever had had even in a small sense.

And that was truly scary. What if...what if they never broke up. What if they lasted forever? It was very possible. That's the type of guy Dan was, the type of girl his girlfriend, whom I of course, "secretly" hated, though Dan knew it, though I had never said it, seemed to be.

Suddenly I realized that though I had always expected to date, probably a million Marks, during my friendship with Dan, I had always counted on him still being there.

Waiting for me.

It took this rude awakening to show me that I had always been waiting for Dan too. On the outside, I had decided that it was so far from romantic, our relationship, that it wasn't even funny to joke about it. That the way I felt about Dan couldn't become sexual if I tried. That there was no attraction there. The thought had repulsed me.

But subconsciously. I had always expected to end up with Dan. He had always been there for when I needed him. Subconsciously, I was in love with him.

Crappy taste in music or not.

And that was big.

That was huge.

He didn't love the thing that I LIVED on. But I still loved him.

I saw pictures in my head, of what it would be, if I were his girlfriend. I saw me being really really happy. Feeling really really safe. It being the perfect relationship because we were already best friends and I KNEW him and he would be so easy to love.

I wondered if it was just because I wanted what I couldn't have. I hoped not.

And I hoped that, after I had made him wait on me for so long, and he seemed to get over that, that it wasn't now, when I finally came around, too late.

The music played in the earbuds, shoved in my ears, filtering through my head. The music would always be there. Dan wouldn't.

It was now or never.

I would fight. For the boy that I loved. The boy who didn't love music.