I died because of a song. It wasn’t even a song I liked too. Not even a song that was halfway decent. But a song that was so menial, so auto-tuned, so unpleasant that it killed me.

It was one of those songs sung by a teenage girl with a nasally voice, crooning about meeting a guy in the club and wanting to ‘hook up’. When I had first heard it, I wanted to stab my eardrums with a knife until I couldn’t hear anymore. It was that awful. The lyrics didn’t even make sense and attempted to rhyme ‘pretty’ with “messin’ with me”. How a song that bad managed to even get on the radio, much less be on one of those “Top 25 Hits with Matty in the Morning on 95.3 FM” shows was beyond me.

I wouldn’t call myself a music snob. I am by no means one of those girls that complains about how society is in the shitter because no one listens to The Beatles or Queen or any of those bands. I like today’s music. I just didn’t like that song.

But I didn’t think that it would actually kill me.


I was driving home one Saturday night after attending a small get-together with friends. It was really late, so dark that I could barely see farther than my headlights. The streetlights in my town suck, illuminating the streets like a one dollar nightlight, so they were no help to my navigation through the dark. The party had been boring, just another one of those “let’s sit around a bonfire and drink spiked lemonade and talk about random crap” things that happened almost every weekend. We were all seniors and graduation was approaching, so we wanted to spend as much time as we could before going our separate ways.

I only had about two drinks, much less compared to my best friend Lauren, who drank the lemonade like it was nectar from the gods sent down from up above. She ended up getting misty-eyed when we talked about our plans for the summer, then made out with her ex-boyfriend, Steve. She was the only reason why we ever invited him to the bonfires, but don’t tell him that.

Most of the time when I drove around in my car, a little black Volvo with scratches on the back bumper from when I hit my neighbor’s mailbox when I was sixteen, I listened to CDs that my sister burnt me. But that night, I decided to go back to my preteen roots and listen to “Romeo at Night: Playing the Charts”

Romeo seemed to play songs that I could handle. Some of them were even catchy enough for me to bob my head or tap my hands on the steering wheel along to the beat as I squinted out at the dark street that lay in front of me. He would stop the songs and then talk about some celebrity the magazines had been talking about, and while he was talking in his overexcited way, I imagined what Romeo looked like.

Was he tall? Short? Skinny? Fat? Caucasian? Old? Young? There were so many different things Romeo could be. Was he even happy with his career choice? Did he want to sit down in some small room in the radio station, pressing buttons to play songs about love and dancing the night away to teenage girls at sleepovers with their friends, or people driving late at night such as oneself? I doubt it.

Like I said, I was enjoying the music just fine until that song came on. The stupid song. The one that I desperately hated and wanted to find whoever came up with this awful piece of crap that I was supposed to call music and send them away to some uncharted island where they could never make a song again. I hated it that much.

The opening beats started to play. I reached down to change the station. I averted my eyes from the road for one split second, and that split second also happened to be the moment when I went right through a stop sign. And got hit by another car.

I really hope the other driver ended up fine. I really do. I don’t want it to be some poor mother on her way home from the grocery store to pick up some Popsicles for her sick son, or an old man getting his cigarettes, or even a fellow teenager out on his own that same night. I don’t want to have taken their life, or even traumatized them to the point where they were eaten alive every night by the guilt of killing a seventeen year old girl.

It wasn’t their fault. It wasn’t even my fault. It was the stupid song.

My poor car ended up getting smushed against a tree, and it was like the other driver and the tree were making a sandwich, and my car was in the middle. And unfortunately, I was stuck in that sandwich with glass smashing my face and an airbag puncturing my chest, and twisted metal wrapping around me like a toddler giving a tight hug. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t see, I couldn’t think. I’m sure the other driver or some witness from the houses around us came running towards me, yelling and asking if I could hear them. But all I could hear was the song.

<i>You said that I was pretty

So stop messin’ with me</i>