I was on a date with a girl who my mind told me was a recent ex but who had the long and straight reddish-brown hair of a girl I dated over fifteen years ago up in Washington. We had pulled into a dirt lot in front of what looked like some ramshackle Bayou swamp cabin and proeceded inside where Mudhoney was performing. I lost my nerve in the crowd and noise and was thoroughly miserable, to the point where my date and I started bickering; she made it clear that she had decided to cast off her mantle of bleak, lonely misanthropy and to start cutting loose a little bit and enjoy at least occasional respites from her sorrow- and pain-laden solitary life. I started getting jealous when some kind-voiced, handsome interloper appeared to be putting the moves on her, being awfully touchy-feely with her even as he had the gall to interrupt our argument, and in turn she was pointedly ignoring my entreaties for her to understand my fear and discomfort with an unaccustomed coldness. She even suggested that tonight be our last night together and I pack up tomorrow so she can return me to whence I came, which broke my heart and sent tears into my eyes (though at least I had the dignity not to let them fall). I was ashamed of my anxiety and cursing my social ineptitude, not to mention subdued somewhat by the cold wind of rejection whipping through my tattered sails, that after a failed attempt to get up and "loosen up" by trying to start a pogo mosh (which was met with strange looks and some suppressed mirth at my expense by others in the audience), I snarled in disgust and walked out the door not saying so much as a parting word to the girl I loved but couldn't please...
...Years later, I was unmooring my sailboat from a dock on a lonely San Juan island north of Seattle. It was a lovely overcast morning, the sky and the sea contrasting grays and the wind light and steady, tendrils of ghost-white mist covering the ocean unevenly like a tattered, liquid shroud clinging to the surface of an incoming tide; blissfully serene, with none of the choking dust and rotting timbers of that dilapidated swamp shack that had become a canker sore in my memory, not to mention the raucous cacophony or disquieting piercing of a suffocating sweltering darkness by a flickering barrage of gaudy colored lights. I was taking my time, leaning against the motor sipping my coffee, when the girl came back into my life, and with that accursed interloper from years before, both stepping out of their nice blue European car he'd driven up to the lure and reel shop that also served as an information booth for all maritime matters; I'd seen it dozens of times before, tourists who missed a turn a few miles up the road hoping to buy passage on the ferry that boards at the whey a few miles around the bend of the island where the town is. She recognized me immediately and walked up to me and almost blurted out my name while her beau met his disappointment at the shack and got directions to town. I shook my head and averted her gaze, mumbling something about the wrong guy, and kicked the boat away from the dock and started the motor. The slow puttering of my feeble outboard motor away from the dock was less painful than feeling her gaze boring into me as she stood there staring at me looking crestfallen; her partner walked slowly up to her and placed his arm around her shoulders, looking at her then at me.
I kicked the cabin roof and called out to my dog that it's too damn balmy a morning for him to be loafing about inside, tears streaming down my face as I drifted once again out of the life of a love that I knew would haunt me for the rest of my days.
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