second round game
(3) Counting Crows, “Round Here”
drenched
(6) Billie Myers, “Kiss the Rain”
150-130
and will play in the sweet 16
Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the song/essay with the most votes at the end of the game. If there is a tie, we will play a one-hour overtime (and repeat until we have a winner). Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/14/26.
“It Feels like You’re So Far”: Allison Renner on “Kiss the Rain”
Yearning carries a tinge of sadness, of desiring what you can’t have but wanting it anyway. I’ve always been obsessed with yearning to yearn, to experience the feeling, not necessarily to eventually be with someone. This is why my favorite yearnings stem from books, shows, and, of course, music.
Enter: “Kiss the Rain” by Billie Myers. This song EMBODIES yearning. The circularity of the echoey “Hello” sets the scene, making you feel how yearning begins with a sadness of something you want but don’t have and ends with a sadness of it not being what you imagined. Add in the guitar solo, the bridge, the power and emotion in her voice as she pleads, “think of me, think of me, think of me, only me.” Or… if she’s the one pleading, is it a reverse yearning? Wanting to be yearned for?
Maybe. But for seventh-grade me, that didn’t matter. This song is a ball of emotion, and so was I.
I had a few crushes: the trumpet player in the row behind me, the percussionist my friend called “Encrated Crust Bust” after an unfortunate everlasting pimple… Oh, did I mention I was a Middle School Band Nerd (™)? Music was my thing, ever since my dad taught me to use his record player and I’d spin the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack on repeat when I was alone.
For me, music wasn’t something to share. It was mine. If I wasn’t alone in the house with free rein over the record player, I was in my room listening to the radio, pretending to oversleep so my mom wouldn’t make me go to church on Sundays, and I could listen to all of Casey Kasem’s American Top 40.
“Kiss The Rain” stayed on Billboard’s Top 100 for over six months—long enough to be the soundtrack of several yearnings. I loved trying to predict how it would rank on the charts based on how many times I’d heard it on the radio that week.
When I listen to “Kiss the Rain” now, I see myself in my closet, boom box cord stretched under the bifold door so I can listen in ultimate privacy, feeling the things the song stirs up without anyone witnessing the sadness of yearning. I can hear the opening notes, feel the buttons beneath my fingers as I press “record” and “play” at the exact same time to capture the song.
Because, despite being an antisocial band nerd, I had yearnings. Yearning for the future, when everything would certainly get better. Yearning for adulthood, when I’d finally know who I was meant to be. Yearning for someone who would yearn for me. That’s what relationships were to me: mutual yearning.
*
“Laughter on the Line”
My first real “relationship,” if you can call it that, happened the spring we got home internet, as “Kiss the Rain” climbed the charts.
I was a Saturday Night Live superfan during what was, in my opinion, the post-Sandler peak: Cheri Oteri, Molly Shannon, Ana Gasteyer, Chris Kattan. “Kiss the Rain” wasn’t the only thing I captured on cassette tape—I’d hold the recorder to the TV during some of my favorite sketches (Mango, Mary Katherine Gallagher, the Celine Dion Show) and memorize them Sunday. Then I’d reenact them for my friends when we waited for the first bell on Monday morning.
My yearning for the future included getting out of Tennessee and “making it” on Saturday Night Live, preferably at sixteen to make my life better that much sooner. So I spent my free time studying nbc.com/snl, the first web address I ever memorized.
At the time, the site was sparse, with short cast bios and the most basic message board imaginable. Username, password? Nope. Type a name and message, then post. And post I did, making friends with fellow comedy fans, including Josh. I think he was from Connecticut, but I can’t remember enough to attempt a light stalking. All that mattered was that he was closer to NYC than I was and loved SNL just as much as I did. That was all I needed for—you got it: yearning.
I didn’t have to yearn for long before Josh was mine, probably because we were the only twelve-year-olds posting on the message board. (Or, I realize as an adult, the only two people claiming to be twelve, but let’s not go there because the whole premise of this yearning is innocent and wholesome.)
I knew Josh and I would be together once I ran away and acted on SNL, but until then, even though we were “official,” the distance meant I yearned for him. When you’re in a long-distance relationship, remembering that you’re under the same sky, and “the night’s as empty for me as for you” is sometimes the strongest connection you have.
To me, “Kiss the Rain” is the sadness of yearning and hope of possibility in equal measure. But I wanted to know what others thought, so I asked ChatGPT… just kidding. This song existed before you could pull it up on YouTube or have Spotify create an obscure “Haunted Yearning” playlist for you.
This song existed when you had to catch it on the radio and press the record button in time, or save your allowance for the album. In that spirit, I wanted to keep my approach to research low-tech. Instead of ChatGPT, I decided to ask my friends: What does this song make you feel?
*
“We’re Under the Same Sky”
As Melissa Fite Johnson and I struck up a friendship over, of all things, Celine Dion sheet music, I knew I had to ask her about this song. It felt taboo to ask a fellow Sadness competitor for input, but her response gave me something to look into:
“At the risk of sounding like such a dork, Dawson’s Creek made that song absolutely iconic for me.”
—Melissa Fite Johnson
I was such a dork that I wasn’t even watching Dawson’s Creek when it aired because I knew I’d never be that type of teen: popular, social, in and out of relationships. Instead, I jumped ahead to adulthood and watched Friends, Mad About You, and NewsRadio, where lifestyles seemed more attainable since I’d have time to get it all together by then.
I decided to watch Dawson’s Creek in the name of research. I only made it nine episodes in; I think it’s one of those things like Catcher in the Rye where, if you don’t consume it at the ideal age, you miss your chance. I searched in vain for the “Kiss the Rain” scene before I discovered they changed some of the music for Netflix. I found a clip on YouTube, but the episode now features “If You Came Back” by Tommy Holmes, which is nowhere near as intense as Billie Myers’s yearning.
As I mentioned, I was watching Friends in middle school, so I associate “Kiss the Rain” with Ross and Rachel’s first kiss. (Early Ross and Rachel were the epitome of yearning to me.) They go together perfectly in my mind, but when I rewatched the episode for this essay, I discovered that it was actually just Ross and Rachel kissing while it rained. Oh well, the association was still strong enough to impact middle school me.
Not everyone I asked connected this song to a dramatic moment on TV. Suzanne remarked that the lyrics of “Kiss the Rain” make her think of “Somewhere Out There” from An American Tail. Her association made me think of Troy and Abed singing that duet in Community, which then spiraled to the Sophie B. Hawkins dance in a later season. I’d argue that “Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover” is another ‘90s haunted yearning song.
Reddit user waxmuseums made a similar connection: “I listened to this album [Billie Myers’s Growing, Pains] recently, it seemed like a cd Anne Heche would have owned. There’s something very Sophie B Hawkins about this song. I’d absolutely put it on a comp of songs with a one-sided telephone conversation as the lyrics.” Once I got over the perfection of the idea of a one-sided telephone conversation playlist, I felt pleased that someone else made the Myers/Hawkins correlation.
*
“Think of Me”
It used to be standard that, when I made a phone call, I only heard the person’s voice. I couldn’t see them or track their location. I’d stretch the cord as far as it would go to get some privacy in my room and picture the person on the other end likewise hunkered down, but the specifics were in my imagination.
That was a major part of the mystery with Billie Myers and “Kiss the Rain.” Julie said, “I love that song!” But she was always confused about the singer’s gender from the voice. It reminded me that people used to think Hanson were girls. Even I wasn’t sure if Tracy Chapman was a man or woman after hearing songs on the radio.
You couldn’t just get online and find out everything about an artist. I’m a major proponent of “we should all know less about each other” (I say as I write a personal essay), but honestly, there was a sense of beauty in having to discover things on your own, instead of Googling and getting an immediate answer.
Even the way the song came to be is a sign of its time: misheard lyrics. Desmond Child, co-writer and producer, got the idea for the title after hearing the Bush song “Glycerine” (another song in this competition). He thought Gavin Rossdale was saying “Kiss the Rain,” but when he realized he wasn’t, Child decided to use that phrase for a song of his own.
But this song wasn’t written as a manufactured hit, meant to overpower the radio airwaves for fame. Myers has always been outspoken about mental health, showing that there’s true emotion behind these lyrics. In an interview, she says, “Some songs I’ll look back at and think, ‘God, did I really put that in a song?’ But airing emotions in public is what I do, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. When it comes to other people’s music, I like to hear raw emotions.” I definitely think that’s what she accomplished with “Kiss the Rain,” and Reddit user Chilli_Dipper agrees, deeming Myers “the original Sadgirl.”
*
“Can You Hear Me?”
With a song like “Kiss the Rain,” I think it’s too hard to separate what the song makes you feel from how it sounds musically, because the sadness is ingrained in every second. For many people I spoke to, they’re one and the same. But others replied to my question with song recommendations, which, to me, spoke more to the musicality than to the feeling:
“I loved it. My memory of it is filled with haunting desire… something akin to ‘Stay’ by Shakespear’s Sister.”
—Janet Dale
I had to look up “Stay,” but completely agree with this assessment, and was intrigued to see that Marcella Detroit (a Shakespear’s Sister herself) co-wrote “Painfully Happy” on Billie Myers’s “Tea and Sympathy” album! Definitely a sign of the connection.
I wish I could remember the first time I heard “Kiss the Rain” to pinpoint exactly what I felt and thought. Instead, I decided to look for a video of people recording their first listen. Rob Squad Reacts struggles to remember the name, but ultimately compares Billie Myers to Alanis Morissette. I don’t personally hear it, but it made me smile because I’d already heard that name in my research, though in the opposite context. Lauren said, “I never overly vibed with ‘Kiss the Rain’. I feel like her voice and music and lyrics weren’t really my jam. I had Alanis Morissette to fill my… not emo, but that mood.”
The funny thing is, I never thought of “Kiss the Rain” as emo, or even especially sad, when it was in constant rotation. All I felt was yearning, making it romantic in my mind. It became a stepping stone in my musical journey, which started with my dad’s oldies before progressing to disco, then pop starring Hanson and the Spice Girls, before realizing FM100, the adult contempo station, was the one playing what I liked. It’s the station that introduced me to “Kiss the Rain.”
Though I didn’t make the connection then, the emotions the song stirred up definitely led me closer to emo territory, but louder. I changed my dial from FM100 to 96X, the alternative station, and got more into rock. I remember feeling so down in eighth grade, disbelieving that I had been happy and carefree in seventh. It’s like “Kiss the Rain” broke me, splintered my musical path off in another direction.
Josh and I also went in separate directions. Some other girl, or perhaps Josh himself, or anyone else, considering the lack of password-protected usernames, started fawning over him, and he ate it up. Thanks to my constant replays of “Kiss the Rain,” I knew better than to let myself fall apart from “jealousy and insecurity and vulnerability over a long-distance lover,” so I let him go.
Besides, the yearning was the best part.
Allison Renner, pictured here as a Middle School Band Nerd (™), is the author of flash fiction chapbooks Green Light: The Gatsby Cycle and Won’t Be By Your Side. Her fiction has appeared in Ghost Parachute, SoFloPoJo, Ink in Thirds, Gooseberry Pie, and others. She can be found at allisonrennerwrites.com and on Bluesky @AllisonWrites.
A Ghost into the Fog: Melissa Faliveno on Counting Crows’ “Round Here”
Lately, I’ve been watching the crows. When the mornings are warm, I sit on the front porch of my little house in the woods, drinking coffee, watching from a white wooden rocking chair. When it’s cold, I watch from the living room window, in an old cat-shredded chair that’s crossed several state lines, said cat and her claws curled in my lap. This morning, I watch from my office, and the cat watches too, her little black paws on the windowsill. She’s black like the crows, and nearly the same size. The crows are huge. Together we watch them, their big, black bodies poking along the ground beneath the feeder, their iridescent feathers flashing indigo in the sun. Sometimes, if they get so bold, they jump onto the feeder, making it sway wildly beneath their weight, seed spilling for their friends. They’re social creatures, the crows; they move in packs, they talk to each other, their sounds filling up the still morning air.
It’s a little on the nose, but some days I count them. Some days there’s a half-dozen in the yard. They show up early, before the rest of the birds, and any movement startles them. They rise up in one great, winged mass, swinging high into the loblolly pines. Today, there are only two, pecking beneath the feeder, and I notice how close they stay to each other. One will wander a few paces away, to see what treasures await in the deeper woods, but always circles back. The crows are never alone.
My mother once told me that if you feed the crows, they’ll bring you gifts. Shiny objects like feathers and stones, things that flash like they do, bright in the sun. I’ve been sitting here on my porch, at these windows, trying to play it cool, waiting to see if they’ll bring me something shiny, decide I’m a friend.
When I started watching the crows it was fall, a season that comes late in North Carolina, where I live now. The trees turn only a muted brown, not the bright reds and yellows of home. It was Halloween, and I sat on the porch with a cauldron of candy, leaning fully into my crone era, waiting to see if the kids would come, thinking about the Halloweens of my Midwestern past, bundled up in winter coats over costumes, traipsing through snow. The kids didn’t come, but the next morning the crows were back. And now, somehow, it’s winter, and time is slipping by fast. But the sun is out, and the weather is mild, and I’m watching the crows, and I’m thinking about home. About the last time I went back, in August, a season when the windows of my childhood bedroom are always open, and the morning breeze blows in, and I get up from bed and sit on the deck with my dad. My mom sleeps late these days, so it’s just me and him, drinking coffee, not talking much, listening to the birds. My dad likes to mimic them, and does a good impression. On the ground, the crows hop around in packs. Some birdsongs are sad—here the mourning dove, whose low cry sounds so much like longing. But the crows don’t sound sad at all. They caw and caw, calling to each other, a community whose collective word feels far too violent for its nature. Sometimes their calls might sound like warning, sometimes they sound a little insane. But most of the time, they sound happy.
When I was a teenager, I was sad. Like many teenagers in semi-rural small-town America, I also spent a lot of time driving around. Mostly at night, and in my memory almost always listening to Counting Crows. In particular, their 1993 platinum debut, August and Everything After. Sometimes I drove with friends—we’d spin around the backroads, which roped out beyond our little town, snaking between cornfields, then back down the single-stoplight Main Street—waiting for something to happen. To find a party at someone’s house, or at the rock quarry outside town. Back before anyone had cell phones, we’d drive with the windows down, shouting to other kids as we passed, pulling up to packs of cars idling at the Cenex, trying to find something—anything—to do. Something—anything—to be, other than what we were.
But most of the time, I drove alone. At night, heading anywhere or nowhere, I’d pass the turn to my house and keep going. Drive out beyond the town limits, where the streetlights end and the houses turn to cornfields, where the hills and trees stretch on forever. I had a destination, where I slowed but never stopped, winding in sharp S curves down to a valley, dense with fog at night. I’d slow down and look in my rearview, up to a house on the hill, then press on. I’d pull over a few miles up the road, turn around and pass the driveway again, wondering what life might be like up on that hill, inside the yellow house, which you could see from the road back then, soft light burning in the windows against the dark.
What feels arguably stalkerish now felt like desperation then: colossal, compulsive, all-consuming. Sometimes, on that drive, I listened to This Desert Life—Mrs. Potter’s Lullaby another sad song we both loved, me and the man who lived in that house, and I put it on a mixtape for him. But it was that first album that played most in my Chevy Cavalier—an album so sad, so full of longing, I could wrap it around me and wear it. I could sing along with Adam Duritz, his voice sadness and longing incarnate; I could sing and cry with the windows down, where no one could hear, my voice swallowed up by the cool Midwestern night.
Round here, I’d sing, she’s always on my mind. Round here, we’ve got lots of time.
I knew we didn’t have time. That time, in fact, was spinning on, and soon I would be gone; that I’d leave this town, and the man inside the house on the hill—who I loved so much and shouldn’t; who I loved so much I thought I’d die; who I loved before I knew what love really was. That I’d leave my home, and the house in which I lived, a house defined back then by sadness and silence, which I couldn’t bear to be inside. And I would find a new home, a new life, somewhere far away.
“Round Here” is a song about Los Angeles, but it could be a song about anywhere. It’s about a girl, Maria—who shows up in several Counting Crows songs, a composite of a real girl Duritz knew and of Duritz himself—who goes to LA to be someone. Maybe it’s a song about the crush of desires and dreams. Maybe it’s about leaving home. Mostly, I think, it’s a song about being deeply sad, and deeply unwell; about how both can create a distance so vast it might never be crossed, how the loneliness on the other side of that chasm can eventually kill you.
I grew up in one place, but I’ve lived far away, in several places, for a long time. I find myself, these days, writing a lot about distance. Duritz, who moved around as a kid and spent a lot of time driving across the country, writes about distance too.
“I’m obsessed with the scope of this country, the sheer size of it,” he said in an interview with Route magazine. “What it takes for people to cross it. The distances people will go to be with each other, and the distances people will go and be separated from each other.”
For Duritz, who long suffered from depression and dissociative disorder, his songs are also about isolation, disconnection, and the desire to connect.
“By the time I got into adulthood,” Duritz said, “I didn’t really have a sense of myself outside of the here and now. Like, this is where we are, and the future seems very uncertain; the past seems like a blur that has no permanence…. I looked for ways to get out of the solitude and connect with people. When you write a song you feel like it could connect with everybody, which might connect you with somebody.”
Round Here is a song for anyone, anywhere, who’s ever found themselves on the other side of the chasm. For anyone who’s tried to carve out their name—in some new place, in some new life—in the hope they might be found. Like we did when we were kids, in the trees of the woods near my house, with our Swiss Army knives, carving letters in bark, circling our names with another in a heart, saying We were here. Or, Come find us. Or, Please don’t forget us.
There’s a sadness specific to adolescence. Not every teenager is sad—I had a few happy friends, but their happiness was mystifying to me. I couldn’t talk to them about my sadness. My sadness—much like, I’d wager, any sad teenager’s—was a sadness far greater than any sadness before it. My sadness was a mountain, a massive looming thing I scaled alone. It was too big, too secret, too inarticulable for anyone to understand. I did tell one friend, eventually, a girl who knew sadness too. But she was the only one who knew.
Maria says she’s dying, through the door I hear her crying
Why, I don’t know
I listen to the song now, and try to access the sadness I felt then. But while I can locate threads of it—can’t you see my walls are crumbling?—I can’t quite pull the knot. I suppose it’s a gift, that I don’t feel sadness like I used to. That I don’t think about dying, like I used to. I know some people who still do, who white-knuckle it through life and eventually let go—their leaving itself a kind of sadness that threatens to pull me under.
The difference, these days, is that I eventually resurface. The difference is that I want to. When I was young, I swam in the deep end of sadness. I luxuriated in those murky waters, and whatever might dwell in their depths. I let my body go limp, liked the weight of the water as I sank. I liked the sinking. I sought it.
She looks up at the building, said she’s thinking of jumping
She said she’s tired of life, she must be tired of something
I knew that feeling once. I listen, try to find it, inhabit it again. I hear the crescendo and crash, Adam’s voice like a wave that breaks and he lets it. I try to sink with him, but just keep treading the surface. I play the song again.
It’s August—two Augusts after a person I loved very much let go, after I heard his voice calling across an ocean, and then he was gone—and I’m home in Wisconsin, the place we lived together, both a blink and a lifetime ago, when I still felt everything so deeply. I turn the volume up and roll the windows down and the song starts from the beginning, and I hear those first lonely guitar notes, the riff that echoes like a ghost through the song, but the distance just can’t be crossed. There are too many miles between then and now, and no matter how long I drive, I never get to where I’m going, can’t remember where I’ve been.
“A lot of my songs are about looking at things that have gone,” Duritz says, “trying to come to grips with what it means to have done something, and try and remember it, that a part of your life that is not here today, even just yesterday, but especially a year ago or ten years ago. What all of those things have to do with you now, because they never seem to leave you, but they’re also not here with you, you know what I mean? And I think that sense of displacement has just been embedded in everything from the beginning.”
When I think of Round Here, I have this image in my mind. It’s a cornfield in summer, and it’s dawn, and the fog hangs heavy above the stalks, suspended like a painting, like something permanent—not something that will be burned away by the sun. It could be Wisconsin or North Carolina, New York or Ohio, all the places I’ve lived, where I’ve seen this very image. It could be anywhere, in this vast country, where the same landscape passes as a highway cuts through it. Maybe there are two crows perched atop the corn, their bodies in mist, here and then gone. It’s melodramatic, I know. Maybe that’s the point. I hear the opening lines—Step out the front door like a ghost into the fog / where no one notices the contrast of white on white—and they feel a lot like this attempt to access the past, the feeling that lived inside it. I step out the front door like a ghost into the fog and try to peer back through time, but all I can see are pale yellow lines, the dark silhouette of trees, and in between the words—would you catch me if I’m falling, catch me if I’m falling?—I squint, but the fog is too thick. I can’t see nothing, nothing.
Counting Crows have released eight studio albums, but it’s only the first three I loved—1996’s Recovering the Satellites is excellent, and 1999’s This Desert Life is perfect, both made of perfect sad anthems. But Duritz often speaks about the lasting impact of August and Everything After, and specifically Round Here.
“This is the song, to me,” he says. “The song that made the band. I think it’s what keeps people coming back for thirty years.”
It’s the song to me, too. It’s hard to pinpoint the saddest song on that saddest record—let us also give sad props to Perfect Blue Buildings, Time and Time Again, Raining in Baltimore, and Sullivan Street, the latter which was once my own sad favorite. It’s all the kind of sad that sinks into itself, and invites you to sink too; the kind of sad that says I’m almost drowning in her sea, and lets itself drown. But Round Here is so sad that sometimes I can’t listen. So sad I skip ahead to Omaha. So sad I can’t resist dipping my toe in the water anyway, and eventually step in.
The last Counting Crows CD I bought was their fourth, 2002’s Hard Candy, but I didn’t listen much. At some point, I stopped listening altogether. I’m not sure why. Maybe my tastes changed, and I got into indie rock, snobbishly eschewing the pop-rock of my past. Or maybe those first three records meant so much to me that I wanted to preserve them, and the sadness they allowed me to feel so fully—back when there was still a sharpness to everything, before time began to dull the edges. When music gave me the space to feel what I couldn’t feel elsewhere, by which I mean it made me feel less alone. I think of August and Everything After, and Round Here, like the fog that sits in the valleys, that settles above the corn, where the crows will perch at dawn—suspended across the distance—and hold onto everything I can.
It’s morning in North Carolina, and I’m sitting in my office, and the cat is on my desk, her head on my arm, her paws on the keyboard. I have to keep sliding them off the space bar as I watch the video, and she yells at me as Adam sings. Outside, the sun is coming in bright through the trees, and I can hear the crows in the yard. One for sorrow, two for joy. I’m watching the 1997 performance of Round Here at New York’s Hammerstein Ballroom, recorded for the live album Across a Wire. I’ve heard the recording, but I’ve never seen the video. It’s a nine-minute version of the song, which I normally wouldn’t tolerate, but time is passing quickly. As is common for Duritz’s live performances, there’s a lot of improvisation. He adds new lyrics, gets creative with rhythm. Like the band’s 1994 performance of Round Here on Saturday Night Live, which sent them sailing forty spots up the Billboard charts, it’s mesmerizing. It’s like jazz, watching Duritz sing. There’s something so alive in it. Maybe the kind of alive that knows death—knows how close we are to it, what a miracle it is to survive. Near the halfway mark, he offers a whole new verse—I was out on the radio, just starting to change / somewhere out in America, it’s starting to rain—and something is happening here, miles and years away from there. I can see the way he wore his sadness then, and I remember the way I did too, hoping for someone to see. I watch it move through his body and into the air, out to the audience, and he’s trying to tell them something, give them something of himself, hoping they’ll take it, hoping they’ll listen.
There’s another new line at end, and he repeats it again and again. And I’m sitting at my desk with the cat on my arm, and outside my window the crows are in the yard. They’re in the trees. I hear them calling.
Could you tell me, they say, one thing you will remember about me?
On that last trip home, in August, I meet up with three high school friends, including the one who knew my secrets, who knew sadness like me. We all played softball together back then, and we meet at the field on the hillside—in the summer ‘neath the sunshine, I am feathered by the moonlight, that bright refrain of Murder of One, the last, hopeful track on the album, playing in my head—and below us we can see the dugout and the chain-link fence through which we once threaded our fingers, the empty scoreboard and the sand and the ghosts of white lines between bases, fading in the dusk. There’s live music playing, and when the band wraps and the stage is struck, the town packs up and heads home. And as the sun sets, we stay.
We stay here on the hill, camp chairs in a circle, as the summer night turns dark. We’re wearing hoodies like we did in high school, though we’re over forty now, the chill working its way up our sleeves and into our skin, but we don’t mind—we’re here together, and we’re telling stories and laughing. At one point, I have to pee. There are bathrooms down the hill, the ones we used back then, adjusting our hair and makeup before games, but it’s too far away and far too dark, so I scuttle over to a nearby hill and squat, my friends laughing behind me, and it seems like no time has passed—like I’m seventeen and hanging out at the softball field at night, and my friends are threatening to shine the flashlights of their phones on me, though we didn’t have phones back then. And I jog back to our circle and we laugh some more, and then they have to get home and put their kids to bed, and we fold up our chairs and say goodbye.
And I drive back home the way I always did, down Main Street, through the single stoplight, and in the CD player is August and Everything After, and Round Here starts to play. I pass the bar where I worked, the house where I went to a party and remembered nothing—round here, we always stand up straight / round here, something radiates—past the antique shop and gas station, then left on 78. Past the cemetery and funeral home, the streetlights few and then gone, past the turn to the house where I grew up, past the cornfields and into the trees, the route I know by heart. I follow the S curves and Adam sings into the night, and I sing along—I walk in the air between the rain through myself and back again / where? I don’t know—and the windows are down and the music is loud, and I’m trying to find the feeling, the longing that was bone-deep, blood-deep, that pulsed to the rhythm of my own young and beating and brightly living heart, hammering against my chest like morse code, shining in the dark like a lighthouse, like a beacon calling into the night, waiting for someone to call back. And in that call, a longing to be seen, or loved, or saved, or known. More than anything, I think, to be taken care of.
I fly down the hill and into the valley, where the fog sits heavy and thick—exactly where I knew it would be, exactly where I left it. I glance in the rearview as I pass—she walks along the edge of where the ocean meets the land—then pull over on the shoulder and turn around. I drive past again, one last time, peering through the dark and up the drive. But the trees have grown over now, and I can’t see the house at all.
So I head back the way I came, winding up the S curves again, past the house where a girl who was once my best friend lived, where her dog was hit by a car that day when we were twelve, before we disappeared from one another’s lives for reasons I no longer remember. I drive on, Adam’s voice high and lonesome like wheels on the road—she says, it’s only in my head—which has been newly paved, the old gray asphalt now shiny and black, the yellow lines bright against my headlights. I drive on, and wonder if these roads and this place remember me like I remember them, or if my leaving has become permanent, the memory of me gone, a distance too far to cross, and I’m just another name etched into a dying tree, a ghost into the fog, drifting around these back roads, past these cornfields, where in the morning the crows will perch upon the stalks, just like they do where I live now. I drive on in the dark until the streetlights come, and the town where I grew up is almost in view, and Round Here is playing loud, and Adam is trying to tell me something, and I know I can hear it if I just listen closely enough, but as I get to the old neighborhood I roll the windows up and turn the volume down, and I flip on my signal and turn, like I always eventually do, down the road that takes me home.
Melissa Faliveno is the author of the novel Hemlock, just out from Little, Brown, and the essay collection Tomboyland, named a Best Book of 2020 by NPR, New York Public Library, Oprah Magazine, Electric Literature, and Debutiful, and recipient of a 2021 Award for Outstanding Literary Achievement from the Wisconsin Library Association. Her work has appeared in Esquire, Paris Review, Kenyon Review, Literary Hub, Prairie Schooner, Brevity, Diagram, and Brooklyn Rail, among others, and in the anthologies Sex and the Single Woman and Hit Repeat Until I Hate Music. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of North Carolina and lives in the woods outside Chapel Hill. www.melissafaliveno.com