But I've Got Promises To Keep
And miles to go before I sleep...
Sometimes I play this game called “What would 18-year-old-Anja think?” where I imagine handing a snapshot to my former self and asking, “Okay, how do you think life is going for you?” and knowing that young Anja would be like, “WTF? We are so cool! Our life is amazing!” And it’s a good reminder that I’m living the dream younger me wished for.
But I’ve Got Promises To Keep…
Picture this, if you will: I am newly 18, mere months away from heading to college, and my mom has agreed (after much pleading) to let me see Dashboard Confessional in downtown Pittsburgh at a venue called Club Zoo because — of all people — my youth pastor and his wife are chaperoning.1
I am wearing skin-tight distressed gray jeans from Forever 21 that show my bare knees (jeans I was NOT allowed to wear to high school), way too much makeup (or is it exactly the right amount?), and thinking I must be the coolest teenager alive with my bright pink wristband announcing to everyone in the building that I am under 21.
But what I also need you to understand is what a big deal it is that I’m FINALLY in Club Zoo — the place where my friend had her 16th birthday party because Club Zoo is specifically a 21 and under club which meant NO PARENTS and which also meant my mom DEFINITELY SAID NO was because it was A CLUB! And there might be BOYS! And GRINDING! (By god, I hope there was).
Sure the under-21 thing was probably just a marketing gimmick to not have to fuck around with alcohol licenses and liability and whatnot. Regardless, on this night, I am 18 and at a CLUB and life is GOOD.
As an aspiring singer/songwriter (lol), I had one mission for the night: Get spotted by lead singer Chris Carrabba, blow him away with my knowledge of his music, get him to invite me on stage to sing a song with him, and from there either fall madly in love with each other or land a record deal OR IDEALLY BOTH.
Which is to say the stakes were HIGH that night and I had a lot on my mind considering I was mere hours away from becoming Chris Carrabba’s girlfriend. Which is probably why I didn’t even bother looking up who was opening. What could possibly be better than Dashboard Confessional?
But as I stood there anxiously fidgeting with my wristband and imagining how the night could play out, the opener came out and just absolutely BLEW the audience away with their first song. And then second. And then third. And I don’t know how many songs they played in total, but every single one SLAPPED.
My friend who played in the youth group band with me (HUMBLE BRAG) looked my way and we exchanged glances that screamed “holy shit!” (Except we wouldn’t have said “shit” because we were good Christian teenagers).
The night was amazing. I’m pretty sure I had a spiritual experience. And, SPOILER ALERT, Chris Carrabba did not fall in love with me. 2 (Nor did he fall in love with me at the other three shows I attended throughout college), but I did fall wildly in love with a new band called River City Extension.
I left for college that fall and brought River City Extension along with me on my very first iPhone using a very cool new app called Spotify, and tried like hell to get my new friends into their music. But no one really GOT THEM, you know? It’s just like, no one was as into RCE as I was. And that made me COOL and EDGY…right?? RIGHT???
A few weeks into the school year, I got an alert that River City Extension was returning to play a show in Pittsburgh at Stage AE and I convinced precisely one friend to join me — which god bless him he did — only to find that when we arrived that instead of being on the mainstage in a venue that could normally hold 2,400 people, they had put the band on a tiny corner stage next to the bar where maybe 50-100 people filed in throughout the night.
BUT GOD, DID I HAVE FUN.
At the end of the show, I went up and introduced myself (AGAIN as an aspiring singer/songwriter — Jesus Christ, where did I get the fucking nerve?!) and the lead singer said that was pretty cool and did I want to go out and get a beer with them once they cleaned up? To which I said, UM…YES! OF COURSE! But also I was 18 and was that going to be a problem? To which the singer just sort of chuckled and quietly nodded saying, “Yeah, that’s probably going to be a problem.”3
And sadly, that was that. I took the bus home and bitched and moaned to my roommate all night from my twin dorm bed about how UNFAIR the world was and how CLOSE I was to hanging out with a REAL BAND.
But I never saw them perform again and a few years later, the band broke up. Shortly after that a third party bought a couple of their albums (someone please explain to me what that means?) and did not renew the streaming rights. And because everything happens through streaming, they fell off my radar around 2015.
And Miles to go Before I Sleep…
So fast forward with me to last Friday night. I’m sitting on the couch scrolling Substack looking for something interesting to read when I stumble across the poem Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost and see that folks are really taking to the final two lines,
“But I have promises to keep ,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.”
Which are lovely lines, but also, I somehow magically already knew them even though I hadn’t ever read the poem (I know, I know, Robert Frost just has never been all that high on my reading list).
I knew the lines because they were lyrics to a song. A song I could not for the life of me remember. I could perfectly hear the tune of those two lines, but absolutely nothing else.
“But I have promises to keep. And miles to go before I sleep. And miles to go before I…” THEN WHAT?????
Google was obviously no help. You search the last two lines of a Robert Frost poem and well, all you get are Robert Frost poems. I stared at the ceiling, straining. The Head and the Heart? Back to Google. No. Not them. I turned back to staring.
“Help me,” I said to J, not breaking eye contact with the popcorn ceiling. “What’s the song that goes like this?” I sang him the only two lines I could remember. He shrugged.
“I don’t think I know it,” he said.
I could hear those two lines so perfectly in my head but couldn’t dredge up any other parts of the song. No chorus. No following lines. No previous lines. Frustrated, I went to bed.
By morning, those lyrics were still ringing in the back of my head, which sent me scrolling through Spotify like a mad woman, digging through old playlists, searching for something that would tip me off. Which is when I found a clue.
I still had a handful of River City Extension songs on old playlists, but when the streaming rights were removed, the song was grayed out so I couldn’t play it. However, just seeing the name of the band was all I needed.
Back to Google. Onto YouTube. Finally, I found it.
I whipped out the Bluetooth speaker and played the song. Then the album. Then another album. Then another. Then I went down a Google rabbit hole wondering what happened to the band. Then I closed my eyes and went down my own memory rabbit hole just remembering what it was like to be in college and 19 and have these songs mean everything to me.
I cried. Of course, I cried.
And Miles to go Before I Sleep.
A journalism professor once told me we create the most imaginative imagery in our heads when listening to a story (as watching the same story on screen, or even reading the story in a book). Maybe this happens because humans have passed down oral stories for thousands of years. Or because we’ve been music makers for millennia. I can’t find the research to back up this claim, but I’d still like to believe it’s true.
A song can transport me back in time in a way almost nothing else can. But the older I get, the harder it is to make these sorts of crisp, simple, sweet memories that I had in my late teens and early 20s. Perhaps that’s a fundamental part of growing up. Instead of finishing that 5,000-word essay on the Kantian perspective of the social construction of death for that upcoming philosophy of religion class while simultaneously wrapping up a creative short story before the next fiction writing class, all while having only learned what a blunt looked like last week, and still conceptualizing what it means to be alive on your own and not beneath the thumb of your parents, you’re now instead spending most of every single day reading meaningless emails and calling it a “career,” and talking exclusively about mortgage interest rates and calling it a “life.”
One of these lifestyles seems more obviously able to create distinctive memories than the other.
We’re likely not even creating many moments like we had in our college years now because of the phones and the way work and the way most of life takes place on a computer screen. What is there to have distinctive memories about when you spend your days bouncing between an inbox and a never-ending feed of memes to distract you from the inbox?
And I guess what I’m trying to tell you is that just hearing that one song with those two lines I could barely remember threw might right back into Pittsburgh, and being 19 and gloriously stupid, and how blissfully my own my life felt then.
Something Salty, Something Sweet: This song was on repeat the day I weeded a local apiary in Pittsburgh — a volunteer project I had to wake up at 7am for (which is very early for a college student!) and required two bus transfers to arrive on time. I remember the people who ran the garden commenting on how strong I was which made me beam with pride. And also how they sent me home with two paper shopping bags filled with the mint I’d cleared, only to be stopped on the sidewalk outside my dorm by a cop who thought I just had two open paper shopping bags filled with weed. (My guy, your girl only JUST learned what a blunt even looked like).
I remember laughing about the cop encounter while simultaneously talking a friend into buying my 19-year-old ass a bottle of rum so we could make mojitos with the mint, which we did while frying up some gnocchi with sage butter (also from the garden) and feeling like we were living at the peak of our lives. Which maybe we were.Standing Outside a Southern Riot: I let this song sing me to sleep the night of what turned out to be my last bible study. A dear friend from church fried chicken in a cast iron pot inside her little Pittsburgh bungalow and lit candles in the early dark of the late fall. She poured us hot mint tea and we talked about philosophy and I’m sure other beautiful things while I thumbed the pink bible spread out before me and realized I no longer believed.
”If there's a place I'm supposed to go
Then why do I know what you don't knowDoes salvation only come for those who need it?
What's the point in being right?
Denying you have seen the light
To wreck their faith because you don't believe it?”
Today I Feel Like I’m Evolving: This one got me through a breakup with a high-school-turned-college boyfriend while I also recovered from Lyme disease and began flirting with people for the first time ever.
“Well I never met a woman so afraid she’d never grow out of a girl.”
I didn’t know then that you could only lose religion once, end your first relationship once, be stunned by the voraciousness of mint just that one time really. And I’m glad I didn’t lose these moments to the distraction, the numbing, of an endless Instagram scroll. I think I could list a thousand more of these memories.
But if you’ll excuse me now, I’ve got promises to keep. And miles to go before I sleep.
The “cool” Christians loved bands like Dashboard Confessional — a spinoff of an actual Christian band Further Seems Forever — which weren’t technically Christian but were still close enough that maybe you could save your nonbeliever friends by listening to their music?
Though I did sneak myself back to the green room at the end of the show to tell the band how much I loved them, and they were very gracious and asked if I wanted to hang, to which I was like, “Yep! Sure do!” and to which my youth pastor took one look at the blunts pressed between their fingers and said, “Nope! No you do not!” And that, my friends, is how I learned what a blunt looked like. *takes a bow*
This is the first and only time between the ages of 18-20 that I would have sold my soul for a fake I.D.