Oh Lately It's So Quiet

I’d met Nina at a show where my friends were playing. I’d never seen her before.  She’d stood out to me initially because of how tall she was--which I’d guessed was an even 6 feet--but I’d never fetishized tall girls. I’d thought that she was with Patrick, whose band was playing, so I didn’t make much of an attempt to talk to her initially. She looked intimidating, tall and fashionably harsh; she looked like a model. In those days she could have been accurately labeled a “scenester.” She had dyed black hair with heavy eye makeup, a look betrayed by her massive smile, which I remember thinking looked like Julia Roberts.

Perhaps a benefit to my confidence, I’d only talked to her that night under the assumption that she was with Patrick and was off limits. In talking to her, I’d felt conflicting feelings of admiration and jealousy for Patrick because this mystery girl was proving to be ever so close to that elusive 22 year old man’s ideal of a woman: aesthetically feminine, but had the interests and sense of humor that made her fit right in with the guys. It turned out we liked a lot of the same bands and--despite what her makeup suggested--thought Myspace was stupid, even if we checked our notifications obsessively. It wasn’t until she left that I learned she wasn't with Patrick, she wasn’t with anybody. In fact, Patrick commented that he thought she was into me. For the rest of the night I weighed how long I would have to wait before sending her a friend request, but, of course, I would be sending one immediately upon getting home, regardless of which timeframe I determined was ideal. When I returned home, there was friend request waiting for me from Nina.

As was custom, I helped myself to a tour of her public photos, hoping she was doing the same. I saw pictures of her in college, untouched by the scene, before her transformation. These pictures highlighted her natural beauty, and in the moment made me feel closer to her, as if admiring her natural beauty meant I had a deeper understanding of her. I became obsessed with these old photos of what I saw as her true and secret beauty, which I am ashamed to admit because of  how much it aligns me with neckbeard niceguys on Reddit.

Initially, we communicated through private messages on Myspace, mostly talking about bands we liked. I remember her profile page featured a song by Mates of State, a two person band I’d dismissed as a hipster gimmick, an opinion I would keep to myself. We found common ground in OkGo, who had just released their second major label album. We agreed on the strength of some songs, but disagreed on C-c-cinamon Lips, which I maintain is an abomination. OkGo became that shared interest that two people desperately grasp at early in a romantic relationship. 

Within a few days, we started dating. We’d watch horror movies, drink beers together, show each other new bands, all of the things I couldn’t do with my ex-girlfriend, whom I’d dated for three years prior to meeting Nina. Nina was everything I’d wished my ex had been. She fit into my life seamlessly, and I was wild about her, too much so, in fact.

After two weeks of seeing each other nearly every day, I had my 22nd birthday. Nina gave me a copy of OkGo’s latest album, Oh No. That night, we listened to it in its entirety in my car while we made out like high schoolers.  The album was decidedly darker than their debut, something that at that moment felt sexier, fitting the mood perfectly. 

We didn’t have sex that night. I liked her far more than I should have after only two weeks of dating. The truth is that she still intimidated me. She was cool, so trendy. I recall always having this sinking feeling that I wasn’t edgy or dangerous enough, that Nina was the type of girl to go for a guy in a cooler band, a guy with a risker haircut or a sleeve of tattoos. That was, at least, what her fashion, her taste in bands suggested. I played in a band and built up my own social currency, but at heart I was a Weezer fanboy who still cared what my mom thought of my girlfriends. I was very much a boy and I feared that at any moment that this truth would be revealed to Nina.

It wasn’t fair, I thought, that I should be so afraid of my truth when Nina had only recently gone from the naturally curly brunette in a college hoodie to the black haired scene queen that I met. It was she who had more to hide, but I fully embraced what I felt was her truth. In fact, I wished she went back to that old version of herself, the one every bit as beautiful, but much less dangerous. That version of Nina was the one I watched horror movies with, the one with whom I loudly and unironically sang New Kids on the Block songs, the one that nobody in the scene had met yet.

I don’t remember what we did the one and only night that I stayed over at her apartment, but we walked through the door with a nervous, unspoken understanding of what was to come. We ended up staying up all night in a night that only exists in my mind as a mish mash of laughing, singing, and fucking, sometimes doing all three at once. In those moments, I was with the girl in the college hoodie completely unafraid of revealing the version of me unaffected by the scene. We didn’t sleep that night, staying up past sunrise. I left her apartment feeling changed by an experience that I’d not had before, so playful, so natural. I felt closer to her than I’d ever felt to the girl with whom I’d spent my previous three years.

I don’t know exactly where we went wrong. In the days that followed, we hung out a few times, then nothing. She stopped returning my calls. She didn’t show up to our mutual spots. I knew she worked at the Irish Rose, but I wasn't about to show up. It was clear after two days that she wasn’t going to respond. To that point, we had only been seeing each other for three weeks, and I was heartbroken. The only thing I had to show for our time together was the OkGo cd she’d given me.

The wise choice would have been to throw the cd away. Music forever binds itself to your experiences, good and bad. Great songs have been ruined for me by breakups, deaths, periods of depression. I don’t know why I continued to listen to OhNo, but I did. It’s songs, to me, served as a little memento of this briefly magical moment with Nina, whom I didn’t know if I would ever see again. Initially, “A Million Ways,”--with its chorus repeating the line, “You’re a million ways to be cruel,”--was the song I assigned for Nina. I sang along with the line, “Oh such grace, such beauty, and lipstick and callous and fishnets and malice,” as though I’d written it. The song offered me the low hanging fruit that one looks for in the immediate aftermath of a breakup. I was never really that mad, though, more confused. I didn’t know her long enough to hate her. “When “A Million Ways” ceased to have its effect, I moved on to other songs.

“Maybe this Time,” was one of those darker, sexier songs that reminded me of our time in my car, but after Nina disappeared, it became something else entirely. It’s somber delivery of lyrics about an unfaithful lover morphed in my mind and became my parting shot at Nina. When I played the line, “Don’t you think that maybe, this time you were wrong?” I imagined Nina off in some cooler place with her new hipster boyfriend, one that took himself too seriously, who put as much effort into his hair as she did hers, a guy who scoffed at OkGo as sellouts on treadmills. I pictured her with this guy as regret crept into her heart, how she’d been wrong about the kind of guy she wanted, a guy who she thought better fit the identity that she’d cultivated for herself. Of course, the song’s lyrics had nothing to do with such a premise, but it made me feel better, as flawed as the premise may have been.

It’s become a difficult song for me to listen to, not because of any sort of lingering feelings for her, but it’s embarrassing for me to ever have thought this way. That I somehow knew her better than others, that in our brief time together we had some sort of transcendental experience, that I would treat her better than anybody who came after me. It’s how stalkers think. The truth was that Nina was some girl that I thought was hot, that had a cute sense of humor, similar taste in movies and music, a girl who didn’t take herself as seriously as her appearance suggested. She wasn’t my soul mate, and I didn’t love her. The night that we spent in her apartment wasn’t Ethan Hawk and Julie Delpy in Before Sunrise. We hung out, we fucked, she bailed. Unfortunately it took years for me to see it this way.

Instead, a third song preserved her memory. “Oh Lately it’s so Quiet” stood out as a sweet-but-sad, bouncy little tune, but it eventually became so tightly bound to Nina that to this day, I cannot hear the song without her entering into my mind. In the days and weeks that followed, those first initial notes poked at my heart any time the song came up on shuffle, but I let it play out anyway. Just as I suspect Damien Kulash lied with the opening line, “I don’t think much about you anymore,” I pretended to have washed my hands of Nina. But where I connected were those painful lines of the first chorus, “whose house are you haunting tonight? Whose face you kiss, whose sheets you twist?”

And as quickly and unexpectedly as she disappeared, she would reappear without notice. The first time was at CJ’s Lounge. She’d shown up with a mutual friend. It wasn’t--or should not have been--unusual for her to see me there, given that CJ’s Lounge was my home base long before she moved into town, and when she saw me she gave a silly, sheepish, “I fucked up,” face. Not so much, “I made a mistake and should have never let you go,” but instead, “I treated you badly and feel sorry for you,” which was way worse.  I was already half in the bag and wasn’t really ready for a real conversation. I said hi to her and made an ill-conceived reference to “A Million Ways.” To her credit, she was contrite, but in her apologies she didn’t offer an explanation of any substance. Instead, she fell back to the trite, tired shit, that she has a lot to figure out, and that she wasn’t ready for a relationship. I knew, of course, that it was bullshit. Unlike how I saw her, when she peeled back my layers, she didn’t like what she saw. I was somebody she could be friends with, but I lacked what she needed to feel any real passion. She didn’t have the guts to say this. She apologized, but only so she could feel better about herself.  At any point in the days that followed her disappearance, she could have messaged me, but she didn’t. She knew how I felt about her, and she allowed me to languish. It was a shitty thing to do, and now she was at my bar trying to pretend to care about my feelings. It’s a moment I can now see now as pure narcissism, but if I’m being honest, in that moment I would have jumped at any indication that she wanted to see me again. She didn’t offer one.

I moved on with other girls, over time falling in and out of love, and with each infatuation that faded, “Oh Lately it’s so Quiet,” would sneak its way back into my playlist. What if things had been different? What if Nina was the one that got away? And each time the song would reintroduce her memory, I would long for her. Sometimes I’d search for her on MySpace or Facebook. I’d see how her life had become more exciting, how she was now firmly planted in Chicago’s club scene, my life taking an inverse trajectory. 

She reached out to me a year or two later on MySpace, again entering my life as cruely as she left. This time, she had something to share: pictures of her partying with Matt Sorum, Duff, and Slash from Guns and Roses. She said she thought I might think they were cool. In one she was wearing Slash’s hat. In another she was on a boat in Minnesota with three of my idols, idols whom she would previously have scoffed at given that unironic appreciation for G’n’R was not in line with the hipster ethos. She explained that a friend was dating Matt Sorum and she was along for the ride. Given how few people were on the boat, I couldn’t help but assume that she’d fucked one of them, and this thought had a uniquely cathartic effect on me, that this girl whom I’d pined over was worthy of Guns and Roses. It made me feel better to know that she had moved on to somebody with whom I could not compete. I even felt pride, that sex with Nina could possibly be a common bond between me and Slash, something that I would not express in our brief exchange of messages. 

That would be the last time I would communicate with her, though it would not be the last I would see of her. The next time she came into my life was through television. A couple of years after Nina, I was in a serious relationship with a girl who enjoyed watching America’s Top Model, that dreadful show hosted by Tyra Banks. In the first episode, they narrow the field down to 25 contestants before having a final competition where they decided on the top 12 that will make it into the official competition. Nina, now known on the show as “Nina C.” made it into that final 25. Ironically, it was the worst that I’d scene her. She’d chopped her hair off in a short pixie cut that all but severed any link between her current self and her college photos. She looked harsher, thinner, more serious. She was a stranger, who, if I strained hard enough, bore a slight resemblance to the girl I knew. I didn’t long for her over my girlfriend who sat alongside me, which was a relief. I didn’t tell my girlfriend about any of it, figuring that telling her that I’d slept with the model we were watching on TV would not be something she would want to know. But silently, in that moment, I said goodbye to Nina, my ghost. She would not make it to the final 12, and that would be the last I would see of her. 

All that remains is the song, and it’s opening statement, “I don’t think much about you anymore,” is one I can finally sing truthfully. This isn’t to say that the song doesn’t make me think of her, because it does. It reminds me of our time together in a time of my life guided by under-informed passion, a time before I knew what love was, and more importantly, what love wasn’t.