Every corporate drone in America with a used car and a mortgage was once a teenager staying out too late on a Tuesday night with a group of friends speeding down their town's main strip with the windows open and the radio loud, and when I was that teenager, "So" was the album in the tape deck. I sat in the passenger's seat with my right foot dangling out the window as my best friend drove. The girl he pined for sat in the back with the boy she was dating, my other best friend, and it felt more like a romantic triangle among true comrades from a French movie than the angst-riddled tripe you see on "One Tree Hill." When you love the guy your girl is dating as much as you love the girl, it's the definition of "bittersweet." Whenever "Mercy Street" started trickling through the speakers of that old Grand Am, with its tender, discordant synths followed by the triangle, the atmosphere in the car was hushed. My pal turned the stereo up so loud we couldn't even hear the wind rushing through four open windows. Today, reinhabiting the boy I was, my heart swells like a sponge cake in my chest to remember how happy and at peace I was. We all knew the words by heart, had all read Anne Sexton just to better understand the song, and the unfiltered sadness we experienced from the beginning to the end of that song made us feel magnificently alive and vulnerable, and connected to each other. What I'm trying to say is, I'm never going to finish this report my boss wants by 4:30. Not with "Mercy Street" playing...