Guns Don't Kill People (Her Selfies Do)

Everyone's got a certain song that's the epitome of a feeling, of a relationship. That defines not just an era, but a precise moment and an entire world as we see it. A perspective made definitive by a stanza or a chorus.

Mine was Hey There Delilah with Sheila, a Chicago transplant that came to New York for college and a purpose, got blind sided by those bright lights as we all do.  By all accounts your average early twenty something bordering on a stereotype.  Just a small town girl living in a lonely borough, fashion major dressed to the nines in boots she got on a sale and cost about half a Brooklyn studio apartments rent.

I couldn't tell you what fell me to her. I guess she was the embodiment of your favorite lyric from a song- beautiful after midnight but a little over-common if you sat down and thought about it for too long. I held no strings or ties, so she made a point to make a scene and threw herself into every artist she could find. Artist, soulful moguls, even a weekend trip with an up and never coming rapper. I suppose she was hoping to strike a chord with a musician, bemusingly be the muse to some starving artist, hoping to land in his thoughts long enough to be immortalized and painted in a song or paperback. In loud and lovely colors because she had none of her own.

I knew the source. She had a boy back home dedicate a song to her: Hey There Delilah, and though she had a penchant for lying it's one of the few things I believed about her. Life imitates art after all, and I found it not at all bizarre a song in 2006 could coincide with the circumstances and longing of his heart. I could imagine him back in Chicago hearing it for the first time, his eyes going wide at the sounds and pulse palpitating at the bridge. I wondered how soon he reached out to tell her after he hears it for the first time- how happy he might have felt being able to point at something and say  "look, that's you and me."

And it meant a lot to her. I could tell.

She even made me turn off the stereo if it played while we were having sex.