And the thought that I was one of the last people he talked to made me feel even worse.

Matt messaged me that day, too: “It was because of the song. I’m sorry, Sal. It’s not your fault.”

While I think now it wouldn’t have been in the best taste to do it, right then and there I thought it would be a great idea to find “See You After, Babe” somehow and put it up on Paul’s wall. Just for some sort of closure. I spent the entire following week asking Yahoo Answers, posting on music forums, and commenting on YouTube videos of 2008 pop songs. Nobody knew anything about the song or the band. I had put my email up on some of these, but heard nothing until last night, December 27th.

In my inbox was a message from someone named “Brad Hoskins”. The subject was “Song by Symmetry Icon”. Attached to the email was an .mp3 file, and in the body was this:

Hey Sal,

I saw your post on [forum] inquiring about Symmetry Icon’s song, ‘See You After, Babe’, and thought I’d send you an email to clear things up and perhaps dissuade you from your search. I am sending this to you with the hope that you will keep things discrete, as there are not a lot of people who know anything about this song and should the nature of it be released, it won’t exactly be hard for any higher-ups to pinpoint who spilled the beans. But, you seem like a nice guy and I don’t want you to do something you’ll regret.

Symmetry Icon was a young three-member pop group that started up in 2007 and came out with an album by 2008. Hard to believe 2008 is close to being a decade ago, but obviously you know how a lot of pop music was in that year: it was catchy, not too technical, upbeat but not very hardcore club-ish yet. Kinda cheesy synths and sounds. Look at Billboard’s Top 100 for that year, you’ll see what I mean.

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