How to Kill a Rock Star

by Tiffanie DeBartolo

The song was senseless and sappy, but it made me feel something. And although I couldn't articulate it at that age, feeling something—anything—made me conscious that I was alive.

I would spend most of my adolescence in pieces on the floor, only to be picked up and put back together by the voice of one of my heroes. It sounds silly, I know. But for me, the power of music rests in its ability to reach inside and touch the places where the deepest cuts lie. Like a benevolent god, a good song will never let you down.

I didn't miss him anymore. But I missed the idea of him. I missed having a hand to hold. I missed the illusion of safety.

Eliza has the sky in her eyes and I've always wanted to touch the goddamn sky.

For the record, if I were Superman, a pale, scrawny guy holding a guitar would be Kryptonite.

“I've never been happier in my life. But when dreams come true in reality they never feel the same as when you imagine them, and you know what that means? It means that no matter how good things are, maybe they'll never be good enough, and there's something seriously wrong with that.”

Man, the amount of pain that history, fear, and irrationality can dredge up is mind-blowing.

I hate that word, CAN'T. I wish it had never been dreamed up, spoken, or defined. I wish the concept of CAN'T could be eradicated not only from language, but more importantly from the psyche of a girl who I know is filled with so much CAN it seeps out of her pores and scents the air.

I sat against the wall trying to get her to come out, trying to reason with her, but if there's one thing I've learned from Eliza, it's that there's no reasoning with fear.

Namely, I know that if I ever have the audacity to blame fate or God for holding a gun to my temple, I also have the wherewithal to remind myself that if I end up with a hole in my head, I was the one who pulled the trigger.

And when Paul dove to embrace me, the look on his face was one of absolute, perfect joy—the kind of joy that can't be reproached, stolen, or marred—the kind that only the innocent or the ignorant are capable of experiencing.

Both horrifying events pointed to an unpredictable world where terrible things are completely out of a person's control, and I didn't know how to surrender to that.

But I didn't think Paul understood fear. Fear, to Paul, was an occasional lapse of cocky-bastard confidence—it was subway grates and selling out. For me, fear was fettering, but it also afforded a strange, almost placid consolation, and a belief that the trauma was too deep to ever have to be faced, which, at times, created a zone of comfort around me, one I obviously didn't have the power or the guts to relinquish.

so I closed my eyes, bowed my head, and prayed for strength and courage and some kind of baffling Star Trek miracle of flight that would allow me to move quickly through space and time without having to put all my faith in a five-hundred-thousand-pound hunk of metal.

“Anyway, all is fair in love and war, right?” It was, by far, the dumbest cliché I had ever uttered. It was an insult to love and an inadmissible exoneration of war. And certainly history proves that there's nothing fair about either one.

“Eliza, you can't judge a man solely on his actions. Sometimes actions are nothing more than reactions.”

Paul was the past and evoking the past was a worthless human ability that had evolved for the sole purpose of reminding mortals of their mistakes. Forget the noose. Forget the Iron Maiden. Forget the electric chair or the guillotine. The mind was mankind's most painful torture chamber, the blessed liberty to cogitate offering either doom or salvation, depending on one's disposition.

“If condemned to burn for the rest of my days I still couldn't feel the fire of this much pain.”

A guy doesn't need Loring Blackman's magna goddamn cum laude Ivy League degree to understand that what most people call capitalism is actually greed, and the whole country is going to hell because of it.

He called me an asshole and said, “I'll bury you!” like some comic book villain. I wanted to fucking scream my head off—I'm not your toy! Your puppet! Your whore! I'm a human goddamn being and I expect to be treated as such! Instead I told him I didn't want to be buried, I want to be cremated. And I want my ashes stored in a disco ball he can hang over his desk.

There's nothing worse than falling in love with a person over and over every time you lay eyes on them, especially when you hate their goddamn guts.