1.

I remember.

Remember fall semester ending, Christmas beginning, and Crystal and I busy tacking up flyers that would dangle across campus like flimsy scabs, unnoticed. After plastering the dinning hall, we stepped back to admire our work. In bold Franklin Gothic font, the flyers decreed: Got something to say? WRITE IT! PRINT IT! GET IT OUT THERE! Join the newspaper!!! And each one gave a manful try, they really did. With every passing body, those flyers huffed and buffed like a fleet of bodybuilders flexing their man boobies. No one, not even a lonely freshmen, would ever care. I knew that before we started. But there was something I wanted to say, and, rather than WRITE IT! PRINT IT! GET IT OUT THERE!, I asked Crystal if she felt like coffee. When I said coffee, I was really saying nonfat vanilla mocha latte sprinkled with chocolate shavings.

Of course she said yes.

So we hopped in my Maxima and sped off campus. By early December, the suburbs of upstate New York already glitter with snow dustings and Christmas light constellations. I took the scenic drive to the nicer Starbucks on Wolfe Road because I had something important and gift wrapped to give Crystal.

Also, I saw how Crystal gazed at the passing colored lights, how her reflection in the window doubled her softly shinny brown hair (that should’ve been in a shampoo commercial). Her always-minty breath left a small circle on the glass and I was almost tempted to break the silence and give her what she wanted: pop music on the radio.

Instead, the hiss of the radiator filled the void of a mute stereo. Behind my back she’d become addicted to American Idol and stopped listening to bands like Deathcab for Cutie and The Killers. I was hoping to change that, change that with the pink mini iPod.

I had big plans for that pink mini iPod. It had to say a lot, talk for the both of us. For months, she kept repeating: Say what you mean, what you really mean. And what says “I care about you, sorta” better than a pink mini iPod? Sure, there might’ve been things she needed from me. She needed me to look her typo-plagued lab reports over for grammar and style, or she needed me to burn indie CDs to replace the atrocious pop music she loved so much. But that pink mini iPod, that was something I wanted to give her. Even if it was pink and mini and I felt I’d betrayed my manliness buying it, I have no regrets – even still. I figured: if we were going to build a relationship, we were going to build it in MP3s.