For a solid six months I wore headphones. I bobbed my head while waiting for the bus and mouthed lyrics at stoplights. I met a girl with a crooked smile on the Bathurst streetcar, and she asked me what I was listening to. Lying, I said "Leonard Cohen" and managed to get her email address. For the following two months that we dated, I kept wearing them, always telling her the name of a new band. It was "our thing," she said with a smirk. I couldn't tell her that the headphones I'd been wearing for the past half a year were never plugged in. She left me when she found out.