Read My Mind

During my senior year of college, The Killers' "Read My Mind" got me through some particularly hard times. Or possibly it perpetuated those dark feelings and drove me into a deeper depression and made my spiral that much more downward. It had the potential to become my Helter Skelter or, slightly more upbeat, the Don't Stop to my Bill Clinton. Either way, that track was there for me when I needed it, unlike the person whose absence made me in need of said song. Not that I'm bitter or anything. Anymore.

Now, I have always considered myself to be a hopeless romantic, but I'm not sure if there is anything about my particular way of life or daily endeavors that truly warrants that title. "Hopeless romantic" is something that I wanted to be and the label stuck. I belong to that particular crowd of 20-somethings who, despite never having found it, laments losing the love of their life.

The details leading up to this event don't really need to be elaborated upon. Like a good percentage of my stories, it involves a girl. And like all of my stories, it involves me not getting said girl. The only relevant detail is that she was out there and she wasn't with me anymore. And the calendar happened to read February 14.

Even more so than usual, this was a Valentine's Day that kicked me in the balls, stood over my body, and wrote a rock opera about my torment which ran off-Broadway for a month and a half. It's the Valentine's Day multiplier. Any sort of angst (a word that hopefully you stop using as soon as you graduate) is exponentially stronger during mid-February, much like how mixing different liquors makes your hangover worse. And when you're fighting off both Valentine's and a terrible hangover...well, overloading on See's Candies really doesn't cure either.

High on a cocktail of oxycodone, Red Bull and self loathing, I stumbled back to my dorm room and promptly blacked out. When I came to the next morning, I surveyed the damage. Surprisingly, none to be found. Room, still in tact. Walls, either not punched or not punched hard enough to make any dents. No embarrassing texts or e-mails. And then I checked iTunes and found the real harm done.

I had listened to Taylor Swift's "Love Story" 74 times that night on an endless loop. Baby, just say "yes."

Without going into detail about my history of morning after recollection, seeing Taylor Swift on my top 25 Most Played ranks pretty high up there. Granted, I was the only one who would ever see this statistic, but it didn't sit right with me. In a rage-filled, post-Valentine's catharsis (another word you can't use post-college), I decided to cook the iTunes books and find a track that would surpass "Love Story" in plays.

Two weeks prior, I had watched the movie "How to Lose Friends and Alienate People." At one point, a montage of Simon Pegg trying on lots of funny hats was set against some song that sounded vaguely like The Killers. Wasn't sure of the title, so I did what any college student would do: went on LimeWire and downloaded as many Killers tracks as possible, hoping that one of them would be it.

The song in question was "For Reasons Unknown," (which two years later would come in handy after a promotion that didn't come). So as I'm searching for my anti-Love Story (about which I will always have to say I'm sorry), I come across a long trove of Killers songs. Including this random track. "Read My Mind."

I'm not the first lonely college student to assume that a pop song was written specifically for them, but god damn if that song didn't speak to me as though Brandon Flowers (a name that, in hindsight, sounds like a bastard son from Game of Thrones) reached inside my brain and wrote down the lyrics with my own bodily fluids as ink.

"I don't mind if you don't mind/Cause I won't shine if you don't shine"

"Slipping in my faith until I fall

You never returned that call

Woman, open the door, don't let it sting

I want to breathe that fire again"

Oh my god. Exactly! Were I at a Killers concert, I would be subtly nodding my head even harder than usual at these lyrics. Over the next two months, I played it non stop. It was second only to "Talk Dirty to Me" on total iTunes plays (and if you know my love of Poison, this is a record tantamount to Orel Hershiser's consecutive scoreless innings streak). I even wrote it on my dorm's white board in a passive aggressive attempt at seeming mildly poetic.

Now as I look over the lyrics, they don't apply perfectly to my situation. Actually, I'm not sure what most of them mean. "The teenage queen, the loaded gun,/The drop dead dream, the Chosen One." Sounds a lot better when you're a) going through a breakup b) on drugs or c) all of the above.

Considering that she was now inextricably linked to this oft-played song, I'm not sure if "Read My Mind" helped me directly to get over this girl. But if I was going to think about her, at least it would be to the sound of a brilliant piece of pop music with a string section you don't normally find on the FM dial nowadays.

So why am I bringing this up? Why the sudden dive into the past?

My parents always warned me that you know you're growing up when certain songs play on the radio and you remember exactly where you were when you heard it. Well, "Read My Mind" just came up on Shuffle. And for the first time in a long time, this song didn't remind me of her. My mind didn't go back to those painful memories, didn't rehash the events leading up to the breakup, didn't try to replay them in a different order. No. Instead, I thought about how this awesome (if unnecessarily moody) song helped me get over someone whose name I can't even remember right now.

Bones heal. Chicks dig scars. Breakup songs last forever.

****

Screw Flanders.