#55, "Non-Zero Possibility," At The Drive-In (1999)

150 Favorite Songs: #55, "Non-Zero Possibility," At The Drive-In (1999)

At the Drive-In didn’t write a lot of pretty songs. They made a lot of music that’s very important to me, but there are few emotional ballads among them. When they did slow things down, they usually did in a way that’s nervier than it is lovely—”Napoleon Solo” is an emotionally wrenching song, but it’s not exactly pretty. But they were capable of it, and “Non-Zero Possibility,” which is the final song on the final album from the band’s run with its original lineup, is proof. It’s not entirely coherent—Cedric Bixler-Zavala’s lyrics are often more about finding images, or even just phrases, that are evocative of something ineffable, than they are about telling a story or connecting with an emotion, sometimes with words that are awkwardly placed for their part of speech. I don’t know what “contusion is hungry” or “all the distance in their prefix” means, but I found meaning in “Non-Zero Possibility” anyway.

I had listened to that album, Relationship of Command, many, many times before I really noticed “Non-Zero Possibility.” There was too much else to be thrilled by on the album—the charged rush of percussion at the start of “Arcarsenal”; the interplay of Cedric Bixler-Zavala’s elastic lead vocals and Jim Ward’s abrasive, shouted “cut away! cut away!” during the chorus of “One Armed Scissor”; the atmosphere conjured by the mid-tempo Rage Against the Machine-esque bassline that runs throughout “Quarantine”; the way Cedric’s voice sounds like Jon Anderson from Yes fronting a hardcore band on “Cosmonaut.” It’s the sort of song that I love, but maybe because Relationship of Command was such a huge, meaningful statement to me, one of those albums that marks a before and after in my own life, that picking this one song out to exist separate from the context of the rest of the album just didn’t happen until a very specific weekend when I was twenty-three years old.

There’s a backstory to that weekend. It’s about an unrequited crush, or maybe one that was semi-requited but not in a meaningful way, the way things sometimes are when you’re young. I was nineteen, living on the border down in deep South Texas, and I really liked this girl who was not in a good place emotionally. I was really drawn to people who were self-destructive back then, for whatever reason my therapist could probably help me identify if I asked. She knew that I was into her, and she liked that, but she had a boyfriend from the internet who lived somewhere else, I think maybe Virginia, and it wasn’t going to happen. Eventually, I accepted that, and started dating someone else.

I was surprised, a few days into that new relationship, when she confronted me about it. It was an awkward conversation. I think if she had told me that she wanted to be with me, I would have ended this new relationship, but that wasn’t exactly it. She didn’t want to be my girlfriend, she just wanted me to be single, told me this girl wasn’t right for me. It felt self-serving to me, like she was asking me to pine for her, framing it like it was for my own good. (She was right, though, and I stayed in that relationship for nine months that didn’t make anyone happy, maybe on a subconscious level to prove something to her. It wasn’t my finest hour, but I was only nineteen.) After a while, she and her boyfriend got engaged and she went to Virginia. Eventually, I moved away, too.

Years passed. Big years. The years between being nineteen and being twenty-three were enormous for me. I can’t imagine putting that much life, that many experiences, that many different versions of myself, that many heartbreaks and hopes and ambitions and dreams into a four-year period now. That’s the magic of being a certain age.

I grew up a lot in that time. I became, in some pretty real ways, a very different person. I moved to San Antonio, then to Austin. I found ways to live that made me happy, that I worked very hard to establish for myself. I lived cheaply and traveled and worked hard on things I believed in. It was a good life, one where I got to spend a lot of my time being creative, living on my own terms. Hilariously, my job that year was Touring Performance Poet. And I got booked for a music festival down in that border town.

The night before my show, I was visiting some old friends in a bar, and she came in. I didn’t even know she had moved back to the area. I was immediately conflicted; a part of me wanted to show off the person I was now, proud of myself and what I had accomplished, and another part of me felt like just being around her made me nineteen and awkward, uncomfortable in my own skin again. She came over and said hi, and wrote her phone number on my hand with a pink pen. She told me to call her the next day. I did.

When I went to her house, it was nice. I felt comfortable when I got there, but I realized pretty quickly that, whatever feelings I expected to come up didn’t. It was not going to be a turning point in my life. I was not in love. Those four big years did, in fact, pass, and being around her didn’t immediately turn me back into the person I was when I was nineteen. We talked for a while, and then she put on some music and we sat and listened to music together. That was all that happened. The last song she put on was "Non-Zero Possibility." She said that it was her favorite song, and we listened to it, and I agreed that it really was a very beautiful song. And then I left and went and played my show, and we never saw each other or spoke to one another again. We're not Facebook friends. I don't know where she is. I hope that it's somewhere nice.

That afternoon wasn’t a deep or meaningful part of my life, but I liked that it happened the way that it did. When she moved away, and I stayed with that girlfriend, there was a lot of weirdness and bitterness to it. I was mad at her, and she was mad at me. At the time, I remember being outraged that she had the gall to be upset with me that I was dating someone else, but she was right about it, which at some point went from being infuriating to mostly being a little bittersweet.

But more than anything, I was glad for a chance to close that part of my life on good terms. In the end, having a few hours to listen to "Non-Zero Possibility" together was a much better ending to our story than the one we’d had before that. And you don't get many chances to revisit those stories with people. Not really, not in a way that feels satisfying. And now, every time I hear "Non-Zero Possibility," I am reminded that you can't ever go back to the way things used to be, but that it doesn't mean that they have to stay the way that they've been, either. It's not what the song is about, but it’s the lesson I think of whenever I hear it, anyway.