I was somewhere off the 5, at a gas station I don’t remember the name of, maybe three hours into the drive from LA to the Bay Area. I’d pulled in for a quick restroom stop, the kind you take when your body decides for you and the next exit is anyone’s guess. On my way back from the restroom I noticed a woman in line at the register with hair so bright pink you couldn’t have missed her in a stadium, let alone a mini-mart at two in the afternoon. She was probably mid-twenties, going by the thickness of her hair, which is a strange thing to notice, but I noticed it. I did what I was there to do and walked back to my car without a second look at anyone else, because I had another two hours ahead of me and I wasn’t in the mood to invite anything that might turn into a story I didn’t want to tell later.
When I sat down and checked my left before reversing, I saw her again. She was in the passenger seat of the car right next to mine. The guy in the driver’s seat had already started his engine, so I held. He was tall in the way you can tell even when someone is seated, with biceps that filled out his shirt sleeves in a way that took me a second to place. Then I looked at his hair, and I started running through where I’d seen it before.
The rhythm guitarist for Ghost’s live shows is someone I’ve been following on Instagram for a while. I’ve seen the band with three different rhythm players now, and he’s my favorite of the three. The thing about the live band in Ghost, though, is that they’re nameless ghouls. They wear masks. They dress up. They don’t get credit the way the frontman does, which is a shame, because without those musicians Tobias Forge can’t do what he does on stage. At the last concert Forge introduced each of them one by one, and I remember him saying the rhythm guitarist lives in San Jose. I couldn’t catch the name clearly but that detail stuck. A cool musician from San Jose felt worth remembering as a proud ex-Bay Arean.
So there I was in the parking lot, running the recognition in my head. The hair was right. The height looked right. But every photo I’d seen of him online had him lean, almost skinny, and this guy had biceps that didn’t line up with those pictures. Close, but not quite. I told myself it wasn’t him. I didn’t want to knock on a stranger’s window and be wrong, and I didn’t want to knock on his window and be right and turn a quiet moment in his day into something he had to perform through. I looked straight ahead and waited for them to pull out. When they did, I started my own car and got back on the highway.
I drive an EV, so the next stop was less optional. About an hour up the road I pulled into a charging station to top up the battery, which is the kind of stop that gives you twenty or thirty minutes of nothing to do. While I waited I opened Instagram, mostly out of habit, and his avatar was in the stories row of the people I follow. I tapped. The first frame was him with the pink-haired woman.
I wasn’t a hundred percent sure it was the same guy in the parking lot, because I’d only really seen him from the side. But I was a hundred percent sure he’d been with her, and there is exactly one woman on the planet with that specific pink hair standing in a gas station off the 5 that afternoon. I’d been maybe five feet away from a live musician in a band I love, and I’d talked myself out of saying hi based on the width of his arms.
The drive to the Bay Area is one of the parts of the year I look forward to. It’s the place where I learned most of my trades in the US, and it’s where a lot of my memory lives. This particular trip had a different weight to it. I was up there to see my cardiologist, who fitted me with a monitor I’ll wear on my chest for a week before we decide what happens next. Given all that, I’d expected the drive itself to be the emotional part of the day. Instead the moment that stuck was the one in the parking lot, the one I’d chosen to not have.
Once I was sure enough that it was him, I replied to his story. I told him I saw him at the gas station. I wasn’t expecting a reply and I’m still not, but I wanted the day to end with at least one act that didn’t repeat the earlier one. It doesn’t undo anything. The chance to say hi in person, five feet away, no crowd or stage between us, is gone. I could probably engineer a version of it later. A VIP package, a meet-and-greet, a smaller side project he plays in around the Bay. Those cost money and planning, and they’re not the same as the version the universe handed me for free at a rest stop.
What I’ve been sitting with since is that the parking lot wasn’t a personality thing. Looking straight ahead was situational. I was three hours into a drive I’d been looking forward to for weeks, and my read of the room was to protect it. Fair enough. The larger pattern is somewhere else. I used to record myself playing guitar and post the clips, and then I stopped, and the stopping wasn’t a decision so much as a series of things landing on me in the wrong order. I got laid off. The financial hit meant selling most of my studio gear. Somewhere in the middle of that stretch my body gave out and I had a heart attack, which is how I ended up on the road to the cardiologist who fitted me with the monitor I’m wearing right now. None of that was a choice I was making about music. It was just what was in front of me. But the cardiac stuff has made one thing hard to keep pretending about, which is that I have less time than I used to think I had. Playing again, on camera, is one of the things I don’t want to keep leaving for later. So I’m going to start recording again with whatever gear I’ve still got.
I’ve made a lot of decisions in my life. Some of them reshaped where I live and what I do for a living. Some were as small as which band t-shirt to put on in the morning. I don’t regret the ones that turned out badly, because I can live with the consequences of a wrong call, even when it costs me health or money or a friendship I miscalculated. The one I can’t live with is the decision I didn’t make. The one where I stayed in my seat and let a moment go because I trusted an assumption in my head over the thing that was five feet away from me.