My friend and I saw each other as hopeless writers, misunderstood prophets, critics of our cultural moment who rejected obvious and reductive politics. We never indulged the ordinary pursuits because we yearned to write masterpieces, timeless works infused with nihilistic joy and dissenting imaginations. We believed in our vision and our aesthetic, so when Stephen Malkmus crooned, “wait to hear my words and they’re diamond-sharp / I could open it up,” in the song “In the Mouth a Desert,” we swore those lyrics spoke to us directly, spiritually, as though Pavement embodied a celestial mode of offbeat artistic creation.

At the same time we remained detached from our lofty ambitions, skeptical of our dreams. We knew what we were, after all, which was graduate students scammed into university contracts with subpar health insurance. We lived off measly stipends and soggy pizza left over from department meetings. We taught undergrads we pitied in composition classes we hated, and we had an excessive tally of opinions that chafed our superiors. For example: We preferred grammar to metaphors. We considered Frank Ocean a better poet than Robert Hass—or Bob, as our famous professor called him—though we devoured his work, too. Like Malkmus, we thought of the sublime, of beauty, as muddled. “Heaven is a truck / it got stuck.”

We were each “an island of such great complexity,” as Malkmus sings in “Shady Lane / J vs. S,” except we took seriously its cautionary tale: “You’ve been chosen as an extra in the movie adaptation / of the sequel to your life.”

I wrote stories. My friend was a poet. We were full of giddy potential, love for idiotic jokes, fuzzy notions begging to be clarified into true art, until one of us peered into the foreseeable future, or maybe the next gray day, and decided living wasn’t worth the trouble.