“and the charms that she got from travel are starting to wear off…”
Rilo Kiley was the soundtrack to the heady Maryland summer after high school graduation. I devoured their catalogue my senior year and that summer their music would drift, familiar and ignored, from the car speakers, barely audible over the open windows as I drove home from work in my mom’s car. Some nights I would stop at the edge of the middle school soccer field—the only place in that flat suburb with a view—and watch the heat lightning thump lazily across the heavy sky. My own veins electrified, my elbows covered in chocolate ice cream smears I wouldn’t find till the next morning. Only with air still and engine quiet would the lyrics reach me. And even then they were poorly filtered through a brain full of excitement, anticipation and fear. I had made my first independent life decision a few months earlier—I would not be going to college that fall—and was drunk on the feelings of freedom and iconoclasm.
