Traveling, I am finding, teaches you a lot of things about yourself. For instance, I never thought myself to be the kind of person who pees into a mostly empty bottle of Bluefin energy drink while driving through South Carolina at seventy-seven miles per hour - but in face I am that kind of person.

If people could see me the way I see myself - if they could live in my memories - would anyone love me?

All along — not only since she left, but for a decade before — I had been imagining her without listening, without knowing that she made as a poor a window as I did. And so I could not imagine her as a person who could feel fear, who could feel isolated in a roomful of people, who could be shy about her record collection because it was too personal to share. Someone who might have read travel books to escape having to live in the town that so many people escape to. Someone who — because no one thought she was a person — had no one to really talk to.

People are supposed to care. It's good that people mean something to you, that you miss people when they're gone.

I kept waiting for that loneliness and nervousness to make me want to go back. But it never did.

Nothing really ever happens like you imagine it will.

But I was not in the band, because I suffer from the kind of tone deafness that is generally associated with actual deafness