The World I Know: Bloomin’ Onions and Borrowed Songs

Music: Collective Soul - The World I know

The first time I met Fay, it was at an Outback Steakhouse in Bryan–College Station — the same chain I grew up knowing by heart. It smelled like grilled shrimp and dark wood and too much butter stabbed into a loaf of honey wheat bread. I was nervous, maybe a little armored, bracing myself for the idea of dad’s new girlfriend. I thought I was supposed to hate her. I thought it was required.

But then the music started playing.

It was Collective Soul — “The World I Know” — winding through the speakers like a breath of something bigger. I caught her singing along before I even realized I was doing the same. She had this low, raspy voice, a kind of easy confidence, and for a second, the walls I’d built cracked just enough to let the song in.

She was wearing a green dress, and her fire-red hair tumbled over her shoulders in wild waves. Her blue eyes were bright and kind — annoyingly kind, if you asked the part of me that still wanted to hold a grudge. She smelled like cigarettes and tangerines — sharp and sweet, the kind of scent that lingered— rough and bright at the same time, impossible to forget.

 But I remember thinking it even then: she was cool. Cooler than I expected. Cooler than I wanted her to be.

Some families bond over football games and matching pajamas.

Mine stitched itself together over Bloomin’ Onions and borrowed songs.



Outback had already been woven into my life long before that night. It was the first place I ever tried grilled shrimp as a kid, the restaurant my dad always picked when he wanted to celebrate something — or just when he felt like “breaking bread,” as he called it, with the people he loved. It’s where I ate before both junior and senior prom, where we kept old traditions alive in new cities. Later, it would be the first restaurant we ever took my son Jaxon to with my dad, another generation pulling up a chair to the table.

Maybe that’s why it stuck with me — the song, the meal, the unexpected ease of it all.

“The World I Know” wasn’t a song about perfect things. It was about stepping back and seeing the brokenness of the world, but still feeling the bittersweet sense of hope and survival in the middle of it. It wasn’t about pretending everything was fine. It was about finding something beautiful anyway.

Collective Soul had a way of doing that — turning ache into anthems, writing songs that sounded like weathered prayers for a messy, beautiful world.

The World I Know wasn’t just a 90s classic. It was — and still is — a lifeline, the kind of song that makes you lift your head a little higher even when everything feels heavy.

Before the night was over, Fay bought me a blue Sony CD Walkman — a real one, with yellow headphones — like she already knew music was my language, the safest way to say, I see you.

I thought that night at Outback would be the only time “The World I Know” stitched itself into my life.

But life doesn’t always follow the script.

A few years later, I heard it again — the same familiar song playing over the speakers of the same restaurant, after a harder kind of night.

We had just learned that some of our family’s most precious artifacts — heirlooms from the early days of Texas, handwritten letters, even my great-grandmother Dora’s ring — had been sold without our permission.

Pieces of our history, scattered.

Gone.

As the song began to play, Fay was crying.

I was just a kid who didn’t really grasp the magnitude of what had been stolen from me.

I thought she was overreacting, too upset, too angry.

But I see it now.

She was crying because she was angry — not for herself, but for us.

She was crying because she loved us.

Because she knew what had been taken — not just relics, but roots.

Because sometimes loving people means hurting for them when they don’t even know what they’ve lost yet.

The world broke a little that night.

But the music kept playing.

I didn’t understand it then.

But love was already writing a story bigger than any of us could see.

Some things can be lost.

Some things can be stolen.

But the love stitched into your story — that stays.