I don't cry all that easily. I remember being on a date with a girl in high school (we went to see My Life with Michael Keaton and Nichole Kidman) and trying really hard to make myself cry towards the end. I thought somehow it would complete the image of a sensitive guy that I was trying so hard to project. It didn’t work. I cried for an hour straight when that same girl left town a year later, but we've all been hit with that brick in one form or another. And that happened in the privacy of my own bedroom.

Over the years I've found myself crying in public more than in private. One such place was my cubicle at work a few months ago. I had to stay late playing Grand Theft Auto 4. I needed to finish the game in a short amount of time and explain to the masses why it wasn’t worth the time. I started playing the game the same day that the last woman I was seeing had officially moved out of the city for parts in the great American beyond. It was 8PM and I was alone, hungry, and just beginning to fully absorb what it would really mean for her to be gone, while trying to pay attention to some cutscene about Russians and Irishmen feuding over heroin or diamonds. Things were not going well.



Then I got to a segment where I drove around in a car whose radio stations I could change. One of the stations was playing "Flashing Lights."GTA is set in gritty, hyper-real version of New York. Driving through the polygon neighborhoods, draped in green-gray textures, broken by hopeless brownstones and grimy subway overpasses, listening to that song I realized that she had gone somewhere I couldn't follow. So I started crying.

The first time I ever heard "Flashing Lights" was with her and I remember not liking it very much. After a few more listens I recall going on an over-long diatribe about how lacking the rhymes were, pontificating for minutes on end about how West could have thought to connect Mona Lisa and Cesar. How clever! Then I started to hear the song everywhere, the way popular songs are prone to populating the background in the right seasons. I didn't like it until, one day, I decided I liked the song a lot, if only because it reminded me of her and the pleasure of orating in front of her patiently dead pan face.

It wasn't long before I had the whole album in heavy rotation on my iPod and I was googling lyrics from it and wondering if there were ways I could work Kanye West quotes into my articles for work. It was a standard musical dalliance and she left right in the middle of it. Songs can become little objects, bits of broken glass, that have some elliptical image or angle of the past in them. It's not the music, it's the way the music catches a glimpse of some place you used to be, some person you used to know. When I heard the opening violin trills of "Flashing Lights" come out of my TV speakers I realized how horribly sad I was about the whole thing. Horribly, awfully, irrevocably. And I started crying at work.