Ben Gibbard Isn't Me

I want him to be me, to share in my awkwardness but he's not. He's much too cool for that. And much better with words...

Ben Gibbard's voice sounds really different when he's just talking.  He sounds kind of like an a*****e.  When you see him and he's singing you get the sense that he was (is?) that fat nerdy kid that got teased way too hard and spent more than a few afternoons crying himself home.  No bus today, can't let the other kids see you like this.  Gotta walk the 5 miles back to your house.  No girls talked to him either, which was really too bad because at home on all those lonely nights he would sit at his desk and write really sweet (if somewhat simple) and beautiful poems to all the girls who laughed at him that one time his pants were pulled down out on the playground.  Or that one girl, Megan, who very obviously did not want to sign his year book (really i don't have a pen, sorry, i would, oh and my friends are waiting for me, you know my friends right?  all the other girls you wish you could talk to but you don't) but luckily he had a pen and she eventually gave in and wrote "Have a great summer!" Which she really didn't mean but it meant a lot to him anyways.  And he sad and cherished her scribbled signature, and all of the stolen glances of her sitting at the back of 2nd period algebra with all of the other "cool" kids.  Her dirty blond hair and her big blue eyes.  Her beautiful smile and perfectly straight teeth.  How her face was round but not so much that it seemed comical, just soft.  It would have been so kind had it not been the resting place of so many scowls and sneers.  But when Ben Gibbard talks and he isn't singing all that goes away.  He's not longer that wounded kid, sitting home alone on a Friday night with a John Cusack movie and his guitar.  He's no longer someone who spent as many nights crying himself to sleep as any girl who suffered a broken heart at the hands of some careless boy.  He's no longer that kid who feels more than he could ever possibly say or share with his peers.  He is no longer me.