When I think about songs of heartache, I think about my first car: a 1986 Honda Civic. It looked unassuming from the outside, a simple two-door coupe with a low navy-blue fade alongside the doors. But when I drove it, it felt like sliding along the street on a magic carpet ride. Smooth and low. And the depth of the seats allowed my tall frame to feel like I could really sink into them. I could really wallow. One of my favorite heartache songs is the Red Hot Chili Peppers “Dosed”, a song that works as both a metaphor for drugs and for being dosed on a person you cannot escape, someone who feels like such a perfect fit for you before they slip away. It’s epic and dramatic in its emotions, accentuated by the desperation in John Frusciante’s backing falsetto and his clanging, descending guitar notes. I would often play the song over and over, at first lip-syncing to it, and later on adding more of my own vocals than I cared to realize. I wanted it to hurt because I wasn’t ready to be mature about it. I wanted to coast along the highway, an aimless asphalt ghost.
Very few songs of heartache defined my senior year of high school quite like Howie Day’s “Collide”. Released in June of 2004, it wasn’t the mainstream smash I always imagined it to be, only reaching as high as #20 on the Billboard Singles Chart in June of 2005, a full year later. It was just popular enough to be on the radio, but still not quite popular enough to feel like anything more than a disease we passed around our friends circle, infecting each other with this earworm we could unironically love.
The song was first recommended to me by a longtime friend and classmate who I saw as completely out of my league. She was beautiful and smart and witty and all the things I wasn’t convinced I deserved to be around. When I shot my shot that Fall and she accepted my ridiculous, elaborate Homecoming Dance proposal, I was as overjoyed as I was baffled. You see, she was Mormon, and there was this very unspoken (and perhaps naive) understanding in my Mormon-filled high school that they would not date anyone before 18. They might not date anyone at all. And so every step towards something like a connection felt too good to be true. Surely the tape would be lifted off the floor, along with the only evidence of our journey: the footprints that came off with it.
I did everything I could to build the connection, hanging out in chat rooms until she showed up, trying to get in a good conversation whenever I could, asking too many questions and probably handing out too many compliments. Any media recommendation given to me felt like a welcome assignment. I couldn’t pass up the chance to tie us together somehow, even for a fleeting moment.
“Collide” starts off with calm, deliberate verses – the kind I often had to listen carefully to and watch the music video for just to properly follow along with. But then the chorus explodes into its full earworm potential, stretching big and wide and loud:
Even the best fall down sometimes
Even the wrong words seem to rhyme
Out of the doubt that fills my mind
I somehow find You and I collide
Mind and collide, in fact, do not rhyme. But even the wrong words rhyme. At its best, it felt like our minds were reaching out to each other, colliding in ways our physical beings never would. We joked. We shot out references. We had deep conversation about deep wonderings. We were just two nerdy kids lost in a world full of cultural expectations we were still figuring out how to navigate for ourselves. Listening to “Collide” felt like listening to possibility and reality swirled together. At times, it made our connection feel fleeting and light, a simple case of two cool friends just enjoying each other’s company, and reminding me how wrong it would be to expect anything more. At other times, it felt like the end of the world, like some Romeo and Juliet shit, but without the suicides or warring families.
Another distinctive thing about Howie Day was his hair. Wild and artsy, it could only be supplanted by Ashlee Simpson’s one-time boyfriend, Ryan Cabrera, for its imitation of a head-grown collision. My mind felt full of combustive potential whenever I listened to Day’s hit. At times, that senior year felt explosive and exciting. Other times, it felt like one wrong flicker away from completely imploding. In other words: it was like just about every teenager’s final year of high school.
I enjoy listening to the song just as much now as I did then. The guitar strums with a propulsive rhythm. The chorus shouts and swoons in equal measure. I don’t consider it a heartache song these days as much as I consider it a song that reminds me of the big emotions I once felt and how thankful I am of the paths that crossed, if only in chat rooms and a Homecoming that yielded a pretty badass dance photo. My 1986 Honda Civic sits somewhere in a junkyard (RIP Albino Batmobile). There will be another day where I listen to this song and, while sitting a little higher, I’ll look back at my daughters and realize they, too, will have a chance to collide with someone and they, too, will tell me about all the wrong words that seem to rhyme. And that’s pretty cool.
