Song: “Hate”

I’m not the kind of girl who goes out alone looking for trouble and ends up drunk at a bar, leaning on a stranger’s pool table. But if I were, this would be my soundtrack.

A girl who loves Cat Power is going to make your life difficult. She’s never going to accept the easy answer. She wants to know why you just said what you said, and then she wants to know what you really wanted to say but didn’t say because you knew that she’d say what she said when you said what you said. So say it again. She knew you were going to, anyway.

A girl who loves Cat Power is protective of her friends and careless with her heart.

Not careless. Foolish.

She drinks your beer. She prefers it to be Jamaican. She doesn’t tell you this; she expects you to just know.

For a short period of time — until that day she coughed and found blood splattered on the palm of her hand — she smoked clove cigarettes.

Her purse is a mess, her backseat is part trashcan, and she somehow leaves little pieces of paper wherever she goes, as if she sweats them from her wrists.

If you asked her to, right now, she could describe with alarming accuracy the size, shape, and taste of your right earlobe.

When she laughs, everybody hears her. When she cries, nobody knows. But when she’s hurting, there isn’t a person around she won’t find a way to need.

When she’s asleep, you hope she’s sleeping with you.

A girl who loves Cat Power is a pain in the ass you can’t get out of your brain because one day she looked at you with those eyes you’ll never forget and she said your name in a way you’d never heard it before and when she reached out her hand to you — you dumb, dumb man — you took it.

And it felt like everything.