I’ve been trying for days to come up with something to write about for this week’s blog, and I keep coming up empty. It hasn’t been a particularly eventful week.

So I’m backtracking a bit. A couple of weeks ago in my songwriting class, we were given the assignment to write a song that included two things: dialogue, and a road we’d been on many times. I found my mind wandering back to my third year of Bible college, the year that I took my first tentative steps out of the closet, a year when everything I thought I knew slipped from under my feet. It was a year of growing pains, and anticipation of major change on the horizon, a year of yearning for freedom and utter terror facing that much unknown. And I thought of my best friend at the time (who’s still one of my best friends, even if we don’t talk a whole lot these days), and the long, looping drives we would take around the lake behind campus, singing along to mediocre pop music that we weren’t supposed to enjoy, let alone know all the words to.

I don’t ever have any desire to be back in that place. But distance has tinted those drives, in particular, with a bittersweet nostalgia, and that nostalgia came out in this song. It’s a rough recording, but I hope you enjoy it.