The Story of Evolution, Spring 2005
Final Web Papers
On Serendip

Sixteen Moments of an Affair, In Her Own Words

1) Meeting.

I was prepared to ignore the man who sat down next to me on the bus. I made myself take out my headphones and talk to him, not because he was giving off any heat or disturbing my studying, but I had heard the tape before, and the idea that I would sit bored rather than even peek out the periphery at the person next to me just because I had too much pride to appear eager was too much. So I spoke to him. By the time the bus had pulled out, I felt something as he told me his name and I willed myself not to make the stupid jokes he must have heard before.

Using advice given to awkward kids, I asked him about himself, and as he became animated and I listened and watched, the tension released. When I was talking, I could watch his face react, and the first thing I had seen of him, a cold sore at the corner of his full lips, I realized I wanted to touch it. Talking became buying time as I scanned my brain for ways to be more attractive or find ways to abort the growing feeling. I hadn't washed my hair, I knew I wasn't hot like Foxy Brown, his childhood crush (revealed during this conversation), but despite my defenses pushing down on my swelling chest- like the Grinch's heart or a bird about to crow- I couldn't help liking him.

2) Waiting

Although I had two boyfriends at the time, I couldn't really feel for them, as the one who had almost thawed me (when he sang "Feels Like Old Times", the song from Annie Hall) had been incommunicado for too many intervals for me to really pretend he really liked me, and the other was so openly selfish that he remains the only ex I can stand, because we never attempted to know each other in any other sense than biblical. The quote "The greater the hope, the greater the horror" returned to me, and I thought about the last demon out of Pandora's box, hope, full of everything you want to hear, with no strings attached and no proof.

I was tired of being comfortable and available, doing a job that merited if not pay then at least reciprocity, which not even Dominic (the singing artist) gave. Hope had been squashed under familial depression, heavy things afloat in alcohol, which won't freeze in Pennsylvania winters. Sex was nothing but work, and no one ever stayed to make a tangle of arms, legs and blankets. What about him gave me hope? That I had met him sober, that I had had to use my rusty social graces, that he was the first chance I had taken in what felt like years (instead using liquor, exes, and other safety nets to cushion any falls). I guess I felt like finally I was doing what normal people do.

3) Dancing

I had gotten drunk before I arrived at the party, because he hadn't responded to my invitation. I got dressed up in a caricature of a woman, and embraced my girlfriends happily as I lost hope once again. Tottering in from the snow, greeting girlfriends and scanning for unclaimed men, I saw him standing alone in a t-shirt, looking shorter than I remembered, and I regretted the vodka instantly as my long presumed dead faith in boys began to tingle, like a foot that had been sat on.
I tried to suppress my advanced drunkenness as I greeted him and admitted how happy I was to see him. He asked me to dance, so we went in the other room, which was dark and empty but for people clumped in corners, standing while the stereo played.

4) First Kiss.

Talking and dancing, losing the high heels and moving in closer, talking in each others' ears moved to the heated silence that wouldn't have surfaced if we had left room for the Holy Spirit. I got to caress his bald head as we kissed, swaying artlessly, hanging onto his neck dizzily, drunk off hasty vodka shots and this preposterous windfall of a man. All the past and future Eileens yelled, made snarky comments, jumped up and down. Meeting his family from his billfold, swinging our feet as we took as break, everything was in the effortless momentum of the present tense and the fullness of the endless gerund, and we kissed in a dark corner, my chorus of selves reminding me as I kissed that he hadn't even drank, that he liked me somehow, anyhow.

Kissing goodbye under the snow-globe sky, encapsulated in someone else's myth of square jawed Latin lovers and uncalled for romance, all I felt was a real god damn throwback emotion- unguarded gratitude, and all kinds of unironic bloomings rushing to the gate. Fools rush in, and sincerity-starved wallflowers are the first to lose their heads.

5) Courtship.

He called me every night for the week in between our first kiss and his birthday party. My closest friend told me this was too fast, but all I could think of was the last time a boy had called me so often- my first boyfriend in eighth grade. Was it because he was too young to understand the rules of college, that no one ever buys the cow or invests this much time in sweet-talking her before the deal is struck? Cynicism has little natural appeal, and its only warmth is in its shielding properties. Hope is infinitely more alluring, and so I responded, Pavlovian, to the phone's trill at night, and began curating the details of his life as we became acquainted (giddily, on my part).

6) Birthday.

'Intoxicating' covers the event. Meeting his friends, who said they had heard about me. Laughing and dancing with his friends. Him dedicating a song to me, calling it his special song (the song being the only reference to my name outside of Irish popular culture). I have not lived as a love-starved waif, subsisting on semen and leftovers for two years, but in this kind of sensory overload, you realize the paucity of attention and affection that had been normal and acceptable. It was too much for me, who still blushes to hear her name said aloud (sickening, perhaps, but true anyway) in mixed company, so when we danced to his song I kissed him. When he asked me if I wanted to sleep over, it wasn't the pungent rum but the fever of acceptance and happiness that moved me to tell the truth without thought to consequence: "Yes, yes, and always yes"- a monk's prayer.

7) Staying Over.

It was never as passionate as it was that night, and he never worked that hard again (a fact I only saw in retrospect). The moonlight and the cast away feeling of making love all night- leaving the bedroom proper to his roommate- conspired to make me feel somehow adrift. There was nothing more beautiful to me than his face, and tired as I was, my mood was not fatigue but languor. Familiar (but not to me) senses of waves breaking, chests arched like birds, all manner of nocturnal life populated the metonymic landscape of the littered living room floor where we nested on stale couch cushions, surprised at the life in us.

8) Morning After.

Eating cereal and watching pirated DVDs in the early morning returned me to Saturday sleepover mornings over ten years ago. But here was this gigantor mannish-boy sitting next to me, kissing my cheek and trying to get me to eat chocolate in the morning with him. The sun exposed my whiteness, but I wasn't diminished, and in the light, his skull stubble glistened. If I were able to I would have crowed, but instead I just beamed away pumpkin-headedly at the goofy man sharing the conjugal couch with me.

9) Immersion.

We spent Saturday and Sunday between beds and sidewalks, walking in the unseasonably mild afternoons and hibernating with beer and chocolate in the evening. The sex was one thing, the humor another, the unfamiliar amount of physical rowdiness (something I hadn't had since my water balloon-guerrilla boyfriend in high school) still another, but camping out in my bed, his life came out in vignettes, all attached like subway cars. The amount of thought he had given to life, to his family, to relationships reminded me of my best friend and me. He'd surprise me sometimes with different things he'd say, but like the first time we had sex, it was never as candid, languorous, negotiable, comfortable. Like the weather, it was a freakish blooming.

10) How It All Felt.

Even with the cataract of nostalgia (admittedly lost in the process of this intense survey of the relationship), I can remember feeling pretty normal. I had come to expect and enjoy his affection and friendship, and while the trysts were oddly scheduled- weekends, lunch breaks and Sunday nights- I loved seeing him from a distance and hearing his voice on the phone. I loved running into him unexpectedly and thinking I really know that guy, and no one else here knows the stuff I do, and it's all beautiful. He'd buy me things, most of which I wouldn't have bought, but loved because he had given them to me; call me; horse around; he made me happy with all the intimacy he offered and delivered. I liked the squabbles and shenanigans, which, with the stiffness of age and loneliness, I thought I had lost the boldness to take part in. I forgot how funny his name was to strangers, hearing only the name that stood for the man who stood for his family and his borough, who carried me like a bride to bed, the way my dad used to carry me until I got too tall and he got too sick. I acclimated to the soft conversion of th to f in his mouf, to his verbal tics (and acquired some of them) and interests. But the trouble with defrosting a wintry woman is you never know what quiescent spark survived, with what life she will respond to stimulation. I adjusted well to domesticity, to a routine, to company, and maybe if I had retained at least some of my cynicism, I might have been less crestfallen.

11) Break Up.

When he skipped our unspoken lunch date, I took it positively, thinking we were becoming less hip-joined insecure and evolving into a comfortable place. I waited at the bus stop for him (because I liked seeing him- as if it could get any simpler than liking him) and asked why he looked sad. He let me talk about timely things (empty offerings carrying social cues, indicating intention and desire), and he turned to me, suddenly tall and far away, and said that the relationship wasn't working for him.

I don't know why I would think it was a joke but that's what I recall feeling at first, like an anesthetic preceding the pain. Maybe to deflect the pain of being dismissed, returned, passed over, told that solitude is preferable, I didn't let myself behave like a heartbroken girlfriend, since I had just been relieved of that title. In a sad act of social alchemy, I retained the brine of the withheld tears of the rejected woman, and questioned him as a concerned friend or knowledgeable outsider.

Although my refusal to react, beyond the self-effacing repetition of my surprise, was so quickly enacted that I know it was self preservation, I wonder if I was sparing him from what he was asking to be spared- me. I accepted his open armed farewell hug, confused, and walked away, waving goodbye as though it had been an amicable parting to a relationship I had not cared about, that I had not just lost all rights to knowing a person I had spent most of my time with. I had to go to class, and even though I knew he couldn't see me, my body couldn't cry. I didn't feel entitled to grief, as it would have revealed my tragic stupidity. So set in a brief emotional constipation.

12) Broken

Denial was quickly followed by getting really high with a good friend and trying to disappear into the Middle Ages, which we swore we could sense hidden in a field outside a housing development. All his gifts were dumped into the free box, with the exception of his favorite book, because it was the only non-crappy gift he had given me (excepting the cookies he had baked which spelled out "I [heart] EILEEN"). The focus of my fury in the joyless St. Patrick's day following the breakup was "false advertising", as I put it (to any of my friends who would listen): between the cookies, the legitimacy of a Facebook-status relationship, and his encouragement of my long-smothered hopes of intimacy (in the most elevated and complete sense of the word), he had been promising a future he had long (revealed on the therapist's couch I provided for him as he dumped me) been doubting and fearing. Not only had I been returned- an impulse purchase stray cat brought back to the SPCA, utterly dejected- but I had no idea when he began regretting me, thus coloring all my happy times with doubt and intense shame at my obliviousness.

When I was alone, I would vacillate between hating him and wishing he would break the silence. Getting crashing drunk and kissing a boy my own height and florid complexion had no effect. Long distance running, aimless biking, predictable inebriation- everywhere I went and every way I altered my mind, my thoughts dwelled on how happy I had been, how foolish I had been, how much I missed him, how much I hated him (in the frustrated hatred of a tormented younger sibling, hopelessly subordinate and admiring of the tormentor) for no longer wanting me, for having been cured of any desire to know me at all, while his life story and his whole person stomped around my mind, a sass-mouthed Brooklyn Banquo rattling his chains. I was a mess ashamed of her pitiable position, contorting her sorrowful face in her best imitation of a stiff upper lip, trying to embody the rigidity and repression white people are renowned for.

13) Debauchery.

This station of the author's perfectly college-sized and -themed self-important Stations of the Cross (in a strictly mournful Tori Amos appropriation of Christian masochism) could alternately be titled "An Unsuccessful Return to Business As Usual". If one were not a fan of young people passing like ships in the night, with no thought to labels, statuses, emotions or sin, the devastation of being rejected by the first male I had really liked and trusted in over a year would seem to be a wake up call to a conscious slattern too self-aware to linger much longer in the shallows of human behavior.

To the slattern attempting to cure her emotional pain with the hair of the dog that bit her, this push toward decency did not come welcomely. She would almost find it funny, picturing herself as she cried silently in the dark under his (he the mannequin, the stand-in in the mutually exploitative and suddenly depressing custom of casual sex) motions, because she knew her face was twisted in agony like a Polynesian mask meant to scare the spirits. The jut of a stranger's hipbone, the soft slap of another's beer belly, made her so sad she escaped into the third person, and empathized for her spread eagled heroine, achieving a comfortable distance from which to watch herself ruffle this now spent stranger's hair, feeling only pity for the two fools entwined like lovers.

Eventually the sex came to depress her more than abstinence had, and so she returned to the self-reliant and endlessly imaginative auto-eroticism of adolescence, and fared much better, provided that she kept Banquo out of her fantasies.

14) Sightings.

He took a class here twice a week, and during the time we used to make hurried love or throw stuff at each other, I would now dress carefully and position myself somewhere I might run into him. I saw only the back of him in the rain, and my first interaction with him was during a heat wave. My heart went north, as hearts usually do when your pants want something your brain has warned against, and in the moment I saw him squinting and saying my name, I saw myself as pale, proud, walking wounded as I was. I had forgotten how beautiful he was, but the distance he imposed with his eyes stilled me, and I refused his serious demeanor and whatever pity or guilt might dictated it. I smacked his arm lightly in response to what he told me, like you do with someone you aren't afraid of being burnt by, laughed like you do with someone you're just being normal with, over all behaved inappropriately for the decorum he had called for with his humorless greeting and delivery of message, eyes imparting silent inquiries of my well-being and the impact of his capricious treatment of my hopes.

However much it hurt me too, however socially perverse I seemed and how easy I made it for him in refusing to admit he had hurt me, I just couldn't let myself talk with him naturally. He had hurt me so much that I approached him with the insulation of denying him admission to the specter of a ruined woman, with guises of well-intentioned inquiry and detached, cheerful acquaintance- roles both of us knew to be impossible- to hide the love-ridden and rejection-reeling woman within. Seeing him reactivated pains I thought had passed, a hopeless knowledge that I would never be his lover again coupled with the instant access of memory to his eyes when they softened for me, to his breastplate and nests of armpit hair, to all the images that wouldn't leave when I told them to.

15) The Talk.

In yet another instance of unexpected blooms, I was laying in the sun reading when I hear him say my name like a question, a dark figure backlit by the sun. My now familiar social role as relentlessly informal and friendly stranger yielded- like always with this boy- a windfall. I wonder if he would have explained himself to me if I had been myself, if I had allowed myself to cry and express anger as a hurt woman, rather than as her replacement, since the Eileen he had loved and left had been promptly destroyed at his rejection.

Giving in to my pleasant inquiries to his weekend (he had earlier told me he was going away for the weekend), he talked about getting sun burnt and doing badly at a sporting event. He laid down nearby and I allowed myself to admire him, beautiful as ever, but keeping this feeling from expressing itself in my eyes (or so I hoped). He talked about family; I tried to do the noncommittal prompting therapists and news anchors had perfected.

From family he turned to relationships, actually saying he looked for things in girlfriends that he wanted from his family. As thoughtful listener Eileen, I was impressed with this reflective gem, but as vestiges and stronger elements of longing and hurt stirred in his presence, my non put-on self wanted to know what this had to do with me, if he could rephrase it so as to address me more specifically. Of course, he left to go to class, and I sat back, reeling from his sudden loquacity. This would be the last I hear from him, until a drunken meeting at a party, in which I retreat into sass and he responds in kind, and I inwardly hate him for not detecting the pain, or for assuming I am healed, that he owes no apology.

The matter is settled when I called him, sober (I am told this was a blessing considering my feelings on the subject and my tendency to vivid, coarse language) and stammering, told him that I had had a bad time of it after the breakup, and closed with an insane non sequitur about what was his favorite color. It was relevant, to me- someone had told me their favorite color was "green when the sun goes through the leaves", which is my specific favorite color. I was tormented at the idea that I had lost the person with my passion for the undersides of leaves, but when, humoring the crazy older woman on the other end of the phone line, he replied "I'd have to say blue", I felt at once humiliated and relieved, and signed off with some falsely breezy expression of goodwill. I cried after it was over, and drank rum with two girlfriends until we were blurry and brassy as pirates marooned in her room.

16) It Is Finished.

There is no ecstasy like a return to homeostasis, no pleasure like respite. When I picture him from the last time I saw him- still handsome and all that- I want to crow for the stillness of my vital organs, including the liver (seat of all lust) and the heart (which, though surprised to see him again, remained relatively steady, bobbing in it standard position). Who is he? I don't know; he proved this to me when he left and I couldn't understand it. I hurt myself puzzling over what made him want to leave, but the unctuous properties of time have worked once again- I can picture him, see him, replay the relationship over and over (though I don't classify these activities as healthy, and I don't enjoy them as I once did, in the delicious nadir of the aftermath) without inciting a riot of grief inside me. But I don't do those things anymore, and it's no triumph of will.

My actions didn't dictate his behavior, and I doubt they did much to change mine. The passage of time lessened the pain of losing him to the point where I can write about it and feel pretty bored. Even the excitement of the numbness has worn off, and finally, if I ever run into him, I can be myself- someone who who's cordial but a little prickly, because he has hurt her in the past, and she sees no reason to act otherwise. The loss of hope of being reunited was the crowning touch to my piecemeal disinvestment in the dead affair, and with it came the effortless boredom and distaste for this dead horse of a topic that I had been affecting, in wishful thinking and dictionary-definition fronting, for a month at least. It is over, it is finally finally over.

Sixteen Moments of the Affair (In Other People's Words)

1. First Sight.

"I was not afraid of Sire. I was afraid of Sire, but I made myself look into his eyes. They were like dusty cat fur."- Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street.

"When a film's heroine innocently coughs, you know that two scenes later, at most, she'll be in an oxygen tent; when a man bumps into a woman at the train station, you know that man will become the woman's lover and/or murderer. In everyday life, where we cough often and are always bumping into people, our daily actions rarely reverberate so lucidly. Once we love or hate someone, we can think back and remember that casual first encounter. But what of all the chance meetings that nothing ever comes of? While our minds move ever forward on the time line, our minds continuously trace backward, seeking shape and meaning as deftly as any arrow seeking its mark." - Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face.

2. Waiting.

"The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment."- James Baldwin, Another Country.

3. Dancing.

"O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, how can we know the dancer from the dance?"- W.B. Yeats.

"Hot from the hands promiscuously applied
Round the slight waist, or down the glowing side" - Lord Byron, The Waltz.

4. First Kiss.

"Your kiss has a fragrance that I have yet to find in the kisses of women, or in the balsam of their bodies." - Padraic Pearse (poet, revolutionary, and Gaelic language activist).

"I want to paint the carmine halls of your eardrum with my tongue"- Jeff McDaniel.

5. Courtship.

"I just kept talking about it in my head, and every time I thought about it, I would laugh, not just smile, even if I was out in the street someplace. I guess people looked at me and thought I was a little crazy." - Claude Brown, Manchild in the Promised Land.

6. Birthday.

"Come, woo me, woo me; for now I am in holiday humor and like enough to consent." - William Shakespeare, As You Like It (Rosalind).

7. Staying Over.

"Even now I remember that you made answer very softly, . . . your hand on my hair, the burning memory rounding your near lips; I have seen the priestesses of Rati make love at moon-fall, and then in a carpeted hall with a bright gold lamp, lie down carelessly anywhere to sleep." -Bilhana, 11th century poet, Black Marigolds.

8. Morning After.

"and when the morning came, we were sick but not ill, poor but not deluded, and we stretched in our bed and rose in the late afternoon like millionaires." - Charles Bukowski, Millionaires.

9. Immersion.

"The true feeling of sex is that of a deep intimacy, but above all of a deep complicity."
- James Dickey.

10. How It All Felt.

"To be in love
Is to touch things with a lighter hand.
In yourself you stretch, you are well." - Gwendolyn Brooks, To Be In Love.
"How love the limb-loosener sweeps me away"- Sappho.

"Although I knew that this tangle, consisting by turns of Mama and Jan or Matzerath and Mama, this knot which sighed, exerted itself, moaned with fatigue, and at last fell stickily apart, meant love, Oskar was still unwilling to believe that love was love; love itself made him cast about for some other love, and yet time and time again he came back to tangled love, which he hated until the day when in love he practiced it; then he was obliged to defend it in his own eyes as the only possible love." - Gunter Grass, The Tin Drum.

11. Break Up.

"Things work out in the end if you're the star, but what if you're not? In Old Yeller, when Old Yeller gets rabies, the boy shoots him and he's sad. Then he gets a new puppy and it's a happy ending for the boy. But for Old Yeller, he just looks at the boy and the boy shoots him."- Lynda Barry, My Perfect Life.

"My beloved put his hand by the hole of the door, and my bowels were moved for him. I rose up to open to my beloved; and my hands dropped with myrrh, and my fingers with sweet smelling myrrh, upon the handles of the lock. I opened to my beloved; but my beloved had withdrawn himself, and was gone; my soul failed when he spake: I sought him, but I could not find him; I called him, but he gave me no answer. . . I charge ye, O daughters of Jerusalem, if ye find my beloved, that ye tell him that I am sick of love." - The Song of Solomon (King James Bible).

"We shook hands woodenly, like a couple of strangers, and you turned and disappeared down the street. And I must have said, to the emotions crowding around my chest: Get away from me." - Alice Walker, The Way Forward Is With A Broken Heart.

12. Broken.

"It literally knocked her down at night, and raised her up in the morning, for when she dragged herself off to bed, having spent another day without his presence, her heart beat like a gloved fist against her ribs . . . Nothing could pull her mind away from the mouth Milkman was not kissing, the feet that were not running toward him, the eye that no longer beheld him, the hands that were not touching him." - Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon.

"Nothing left- he stole the heart beating from my chest
I tried to call the cops- that type of thief they can't arrest
Pain suppressed will lead to cardiac arrest
Diamonds, [I] deserved diamonds but he convinced me I was worth less
When my peoples would protest
I told them mind they business cuz my shit was complex- more than just the sex
I was blessed but couldn't feel it like when I was caressed
I spent nights clutching my breast overwhelmed by God's test" - Lauryn Hill, Manifest.

13. Sightings.

"Oh, she thought, when she saw his face, I had forgotten how beautiful he is."- Song of Solomon.

"She glanced, and, paralyzed by deadly pain,
Her eyes no longer saw anything;
And her body became transparent salt
And her quick feet were rooted to the spot."
-Anna Akhmatova, Lot's Wife.

14. Substitution.

"The standard way of overcoming pain is to learn to endure it-- that is, to become hardened to it defensively. This is based on the old axiom that one pain drives out another, and one could find innumerable instances of this principle in the ethnographic literature, showing how bravery, endurance of pain, the undergoing of initiation tests and the acquisition of a conscious awareness of the self are all linked with a conscious repression of infantile and womanish feelings." - F.J.H. Huxley, The ritual of Voodoo and the symbolism of the body.

"After the briskness of loving, loving stops. And you roll over with death stretched out alongside you like a feather boa, or a snake, light as air, and you... you don't even ask for anything or try to say something to him because it's obviously your own damn fault. You haven't been able to- to what? To open your heart. You open your legs but can't, or don't dare anymore, to open your heart."- Susan Minot, Lust.

"At times I was so lonely I was amazed I didn't just expire right there on the spot, as if loneliness that strong were a divine thunderbolt that could strike me down at any moment. . . Not surprisingly, I saw sex as my salvation. If only I could get someone to have sex with me, it would mean that I was attractive, that someone could love me. I never doubted my own ability to love, only that love would never be returned." - Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face.

15. The Talk.

"La verdad, aunque severa, es amiga verdadera"- Puerto Rican dicho. (The truth, though severe, is a true friend)

16. Se acabo (It is finished).

One day you forget his bitter smell
and one day you forget your shame.
You remember how your small cry
rose like a blackbird from the corn,
when you picked yourself up from the earth
how the clouds moved on.
-Sandra Cisneros, Mariela.

And Again, Sixteen Snapshots of A Falling Arc (Set to Music)

Version 1: As I Heard It

1) Them There Eyes- Billie Holiday.
2) El Scorcho- Weezer.
3) Billie Jean- Michael Jackson.
4) Spottieottiedopalicious- Outkast.
5) Tu Voz- Celia Cruz.
6) Motown Philly- Boyz II Men.
7) Because the Night- Patti Smith.
8) Diary- Alicia Keys.
9) Butterflies- Floetry.
10) Bang Bang- Nancy Sinatra.
11) Another Lonely Day- Ben Harper.
12) Shatter- Liz Phair.
13) When You Were Mine- Cyndi Lauper.
14) Paper Bag- Fiona Apple.
15) Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered- Ella Fitzgerald.

Version 2: As It Happened- Music of the Events Depicted (Where Applicable).

1) The Bargain Store- Dolly Parton.
2) The Way I Feel Inside- The Zombies.
3) Ms. Fat Booty- Mos Def.
4) Hold Me Tight- ESG.
5) Excuse Me- Loudon Wainwright III.
6) Come On Eileen- Save Ferris.
7) Freek'n U- Jodeci. [Evidence of the chasm between the event and the author's perception -a '90s bedroom banger is remembered as a Patti Smith elegy.]
8) C.R.E.A.M. (Cash Rules Everything Around Me)- Wu Tang Clan.
9) Guava Jelly- Bob Marley.
10) Love and Happiness- Al Green. [A song both parties could agree on.]
11) T.O.J. (Time Out of Joint)- El P.
12) Cuando Tu Me Querias (When You Loved Me)- Celia Cruz.
13) Blood Roses- Tori Amos.
14) Here Comes My Baby- Cat Stevens.
15) Unsubstantiated Rumors Are Good Enough For Me- Against Me!
16) I Used To Love Him- Lauryn Hill.


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