I drive around in my Mustang, hoping to forget a chick like you. I gun the engine, flooring out of the suburban dregs of strip malls with their cardboard pizza and greasy Chinese food. I push past all the ants who’ve been swallowed up by the machine as they come and go from their daytime routine of mindlessness in the factories they call Real Life. Finally, I’m by the ocean, cruising for miles and miles alongside the ravages of the sea, the only place I felt free when you met me.

But it’s useless. Everywhere I go, there is a memory of you. I can’t even run back to the life I had before you, because you hijacked it and made it part of us. Music? Everything I listened to, you claimed you liked too. Didn’t matter what it was and you supposedly loved it. Nine Inch Nails, Iron Maiden, Floyd, the Doors, Hendrix, oh you just had to love anything that was mine to make it yours. But now you are gone, and you have taken everything with you, including my soul. So I can’t even be the man I was before you, and I have no idea who it is I am supposed to be when everything in me has been stolen by you.

You know, when I met you, I thought you were different. I believed you cared when you listened to me, that the connection we made in those moments was real. But it was all a gimmick, like I was scammed by some sleazebag of a salesman selling me a used lemon of a car or just a used lemon. You turned out to be the very thing that I was always leery of, and yet you tricked me anyway out of the very essence I am. You don’t even know the price you made me pay, with your lies and your deception. I trusted you, gave you everything there was in my soul to give. For you, it was just party day to take who I was and use it to destroy me.

I don’t believe in friendship anymore. That is what you stole from me, all the time I spent with you as we stood on the side sharing what I thought was a private thought that was growing into something more. You were my friend for so long before you convinced me that I was more than that to you. But you lied about that, a friend who lied to me. Now, all my friends seem like a lying idiots. Hey, you lied to me, right? So why wouldn’t they? I can’t even go and hang out with the guys like I did before I met you. Because of you, I wonder what it is they are really thinking. I don’t believe anything they say to me, after the friend you were lied to me about everything. You said you were giving me your soul, and I believed you.

Shit, remember those times we hung out in my car? We’d drive around for hours, park by the ocean listening to music. You’d laugh at everyone I called a loser. So now I say, were you laughing at me the same way? Was I the one you were laughing at the whole time?

Before you, I never really believed in love. I would hear all of my friends say how they were in love, and it never made any sense to me. The I met you, and finally someone seemed to understand me. You laughed and nodded when I said love was some kind of gimmick to get people to become breeders when they’d rather go surfing. All the other girls who came before me tried to change my mind, to show me that love was the only thing that mattered, and all it took would be “the right girl” for me to fall for. Whoever was playing the game of the day always claimed to be “the right girl”, just proving to me what a joke the whole game was.

But you were the one girl who didn’t try to change my mind. You agreed with me. You said, love was stupid, love was what society pushed to get you to conform and think that settling in a house in the suburbs with cranky neighbors was actually better than the thrill of the chase of travel, never settling down. Love was the beginning of death, you said. It was the first time I was with a girl that I could actually agree with. But you are gone, and now I wonder. Were you no better than any of the other girls, except you played the game so well I didn’t know I was being played? That I was tricked in the end by a chick?

Because after all that, you were the one I did fall in love with. The girls who all said, I needed to wait for the right one to come along, they were right. Except it had to be you, and now you are gone. Not only that, you have left to be with another man. I might have understood if you had left me, and I saw you on some You Tube video called “Check Out This Crazy American Chick!!!” hitchhiking your way alone across the universe. Then at least I would have been abandoned for the promise of freedom over what you called a “trap of affection”. But no. You left me to be with another man. You, who said there was no such thing as love, what was I to you? What is he?

I still feel you in my soul, and you keep me trapped in some room where I can’t even find myself. I was some stepping stone you seduced until you moved on to someone else that you could conquer. You must have felt you defeated me. For you to rule the world, you have to travel its furthest corners. So you abandon me to my own entrapment. You don’t know the price you made me pay, losing the very essence I had of myself to the surprise of love. And you won’t ever know, nor will you ever care. Because you have gone, and I will never find you in the new place you have traveled to. And I have lost myself to what I thought was you, wandering the streets to get here to the ocean I once loved before you, without any hope of regaining what you were to me.

I park the Mustang by the ocean bluff, the place where I first kissed you, and let it change everything between us, leading to this moment. It had always been our favorite place to chill out, because like that first moment and right now, we always had the place to ourselves. Now, even you are gone. I roll the windows down, so I can hear the water’s roar. It’s loud enough to drown your lie, even in a place that had always been about us.

The waves crash, and it’s good to hear them. I begin to feel free of you. I don’t feel as pissed at you anymore, the longer I stay here. Maybe you never loved me, I don’t know. But if you didn’t, then you were the one who stayed true to freedom. Me, I fell in love, and I guess that means I was the one who changed the game. You made me pay for that love, but I feel my debt is paid. You left, and I have my freedom back. I don’t owe you anything, anymore.

For at least a moment, I forget you exist, and the price I paid for loving you. The elements are stronger than your poison. For the first time since you left, I feel alive. For the first time, I realize my debt to you is paid. Maybe it’s only for a moment. But the ocean wipes away the cell you have imprisoned me in. It leaves me in its wake. It’s good to wipe the slate clean of you. The ocean has rescued me, making me a free man once again.