Isat in the backseat of my grandmother’s car, wearing the headphones I had gotten for Christmas and watching the green-smothered Alabama roadside pass by my window. It smelled of mildew, of decade-old fabric car seats that had been baking in the sticky southern heat every day for years, a smell embedded so deep even the crisp AC pouring out from the dash couldn’t push it away. My dad sat in front of me in the passenger seat. He had been divorced from my mother and living with his own for two years; I was thirteen, visiting him from Michigan for the summer with my siblings.

“If you were here beside me / Instead of in New York …”

I was dreaming of a boy back home in Michigan. He was tall, sweet and funny — my first love. I missed him. So, I turned to music. “New York” by Snow Patrol was a

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