Listening to music has always been a visceral experience for me. It’s a medium that transcends language, commencing where speech ends and echoing what words fail to capture. I am also a creature of habit; I love what I love and will listen to the same song over and over again for months on end, much to the exasperation of my roommates. So naturally, over the last twenty years, certain songs have become viscerally tethered to certain memories of mine, each a unique title in the soundtrack of my life. Their immediate effect on me is paralyzing; a song will play casually in a store as I walk past and it’ll stop me dead in my tracks. One second I’m fine and the next, it all comes crashing back without warning. Past memories ride shotgun to my every thought and it’s this remembered world that suddenly becomes more lucid, more inescapably real, than the physical one I inhabit and I phase between the two.
To be perfectly frank, I stole this idea from one of my favorite YouTubers, @wholesomesimon. Or rather, I like to reassure myself that it was more artistic inspiration than outright thievery. But regardless, here it is – for no particular reason other than personal catharsis and creative experimentation – I present to you the abridged soundtrack of my life.
I’d Rather Be With You – Joshua Radin
I’m seven. It’s the summer of ‘08 and I’m sitting illegally in the front passenger seat of my mom’s silver Toyota Camry with my feet propped on the dashboard. My sister is in the driver’s seat to my left, animatedly explaining some intellectually foreign concept to me that she’s acquired in university this past year (note: she’s thirteen years older than I am and is attending an ivy league college on the East Coast). I nod vigorously in solidarity, feigning comprehension but not grasping a single word that escapes her lips. I’m just happy she’s here. She’s my best friend and I’d spend the rest of my life listening to her if I could. I smile toothily at her and she smiles back.
We’re parallel parked on the side of the road next to The Queen’s Medical Center, waiting for our mom to wrap up her doctor’s appointment. In my sister’s hand is a folded up magazine that she’s using to fan the both of us. Despite the fact that it’s 85° and the humidity in Hawaii is somewhat akin to being submerged underwater, both of us have been conditioned by countless years of enduring our mother’s conservatism and stern pragmatism: “Don’t leave the AC on for too long, it’s a waste of fuel. Roll down the windows and enjoy some fresh air.” Unfortunately for the both of us, the summer air feels more stuffy than fresh and my sister’s fanning is not the least bit effective, as I feel a bead of sweat drip down my temples.
“I’m actually going to pass out,” she proclaims suddenly, mid-sentence. Ah, finally a statement I understand. I groan in consensus.
“Me too, I’m so sweaty. Look,” I say, turning my body towards her and raising my arms up like the dignified individual that I am. “It’s not good.”
“Gross, Han, put your arms down,” she laughs, scrunching her nose in disapproving judgment. “Okay, what if we went to McDonald’s?” My eyes widen at her proposal.
“What about Mom?”
“I’m sure we’ll be back before she’s done. You know how she is, she’s probably chatting with the nurse about some new recipe she found online. We’ll be here all day.” For once, I nod vigorously in genuine understanding. Indeed, this is a very likely possibility.
“Okay! Can I get ice cream?”
“Anything you want.”
She starts the engine and I squeal in excitement, sitting up and taking my feet off the dashboard. And as we’re cruising down Punchbowl Street with the stereo blasting, singing at the top of our lungs to Joshua Radin’s “I’d Rather Be With You,” I know I’ll have this moment memorized for the rest of my life – that one day in summer with my best friend, when everything was more than enough.
Start A Riot – BANNERS
I’m fifteen and it’s my sophomore year of high school. My days are prolonged by the monotony of AP U.S. History classes, driver’s ed sessions, and track & field practice which I’ve decided to sign up for in a moment of naive overconfidence (Note: I’ve come to accept that I am simply not built for physical exercise). However, my insipid boredom at fifteen is quickly eclipsed by my newfound obsession with the television show, “The Royals.” Every Sunday afternoon like clockwork, I would sprawl out on the couch and play that week’s episode on E! Online with my sister on FaceTime (so we could react together in real time, of course). It’s entertaining, mind-numbingly trashy, and we love every single second of it. After the episode ends, we both proceed to spend the next 90 minutes browsing every online store known to man, futilely trying to recreate Princess Eleanor’s latest outfits. Neither of us are remotely cool enough to pull anything off but that doesn’t faze us. We then track down every new song featured in the show’s soundtrack and add it to our joint Spotify playlist. Our favorite of Season 1? “Start A Riot” by BANNERS.
To the outside observer, this was an inconsequential year. Nothing earth-shattering or life-changing happened. But it’s a grounding reminder of a simpler time in my past, a time to look back on and revel in the quieter joys of life. It’s often the smaller moments that you don’t appreciate enough until one day, you look back and everything’s different.
Never Not – Lauv
I’m seventeen and I learn what heartbreak feels like for the first time. He’s eighteen and my best friend. I met him in the orchestra room years ago as an awkward, lanky middle-schooler and wasn’t too intrigued in the beginning. I mean, he played football and I was in Book Club. But we ended up becoming friends, not because we both liked sports (I understood absolutely nothing despite his repeated efforts to educate me), not because we both loved the same books (he hated reading, much to my disappointment and to his amusement), but simply because he happened to be here, and I happened to be there.
Seven years later, we’re graduating high school and I know everything will change. He’s spending the next four years in Cambridge, Massachusetts and be in Seattle, Washington. For a little while, we try to make it work. I remember those days like it was yesterday. Lauv’s “Never Not” is playing softly from my laptop. It’s 4:30 AM and the air is unusually crisp and dry. Through the phone, I can hear the staccato rhythm of rain falling upon ivy and cobblestones and his words, slurring from fatigue, cutting through the electrical static. It won’t always be like this, I promise. For a little while, I let myself believe him. And so we talk and laugh and reminisce about past late night rendezvous, about secret midnight phone calls and who fell asleep first, about the time he was chased at 3 AM by a crazy man in our 24-hour neighborhood diner (a frequented spot for many until this unfortunate incident occurred). We pretend like everything is as it used to be and neither of us bother to acknowledge the quiet echoes of a heartbreak that is yet to come. Not until the calls went from every night to every week. Then once every few weeks. Then once a month. And that’s when we knew.
For the longest time, I carried him inside and outside, in everything that remained of me after him. And like every other angsty teen, despite the plethora of books and copious amounts of Netflix movies that tell us otherwise, I was so convinced that I’d spend the rest of my life writing about him, about boys who weren’t him, about all who fell short of him. Until one day, I didn’t anymore. With every day that passed, I let one more outline, one more vestige of him falter in the echoes of a distant memory. Funny how life works that way. I’ll admit, it still comes crashing back without warning when Lauv’s “Never Not” starts playing – the empty parking lots, the libraries, the hallways, the way they always trace back to him. The same old paperbacks, same plaid skirt, same brown eyes, same boyish smile – the brief chapter of a girl and a boy who grew to have bigger dreams than their hometowns. And like frames of old film, memories slowly replay in my mind one by one of what we were and what we could’ve been.
But for once, it doesn’t hurt anymore.
Hallucinogenics – Matt Maeson
I’m in Rome. It’s the winter quarter of my junior year and I’ve decided to escape the bleak showers of Seattle to spend the next two months in the capital of Italy. Shedding my usual hoodie and sneakers for a long black peacoat and knee high boots (an outfit only a European city could embolden me to wear), I slip out quietly onto the narrow, winding street of Via del Governo Vecchio. It’s midnight. Waxy moonlight washes over rows of old rooftops and I feel the city pressing in all around me, a cobblestoned labyrinth caught in a rare, transient moment of stillness. I take in the scent of tobacco and malt, the soft glow of the amber streetlamps, brackish water lapping on the banks of the Tiber River, and dark passages disappearing between old Baroque buildings. It feels like freedom, it feels like art, it feels like poetry, and I think to myself, so this is Caput Mundi, the eternal city and once the capital of the world.
At a certain point during my aimless meanderings, I find myself at my friends’ apartment a few blocks from mine. Thirty minutes later, so does everyone else in my program. Some are chatting at the dining table, surrounded by scraps of leftover focaccia and empty bottles of €3 grocery store wine. Others are huddled in the hallway, engrossed in a very serious discussion about where to find the best caffè lattes in Rome. As for me, I’m sitting cross legged on the couch holding a glass of merlot, circled by five others in variations of this same position. My friend is playing the guitar next to me and we’re all singing off pitch to Matt Maeson’s “Hallucinogenics” with giddy smiles plastered on our faces. None of us say anything but we can all sense it. The unspoken realization that we’ll never be in this exact same place feeling this way again. So I take it all in.
That winter, we did things casually. A mismatch of 20-somethings running away from our problems under the guise of “studying” abroad. It was an eight-week long, wine-drunk intermission from reality and for a few brief moments, between the espresso breaks at corner coffee bars and the weekend mojitos along the southern coast, we believed that this could be forever. In some way, it was.
All Too Well – Taylor Swift (Taylor’s Version)
I’m twenty. It’s October ‘22 and the commencement of my last year in university. Most mornings, I wake up at 7 AM, do my makeup haphazardly, take a brush to my nest of hair, and spend the next 30 minutes berating my wardrobe for its lack of cute outfits before shoving a hoodie over my head and calling it a day because I’m now running late. Today, however, I pull on a cream knit sweater, a pair of vintage Levi’s, and black chelsea boots, before finishing it off with a plaid headband and gold hoops (I unintentionally try to become Rory Gilmore every fall). It’s a concerted effort to look how I’m not feeling: put-together and in control. Somehow in the last few months, I’ve managed to secure a job post-graduation but instead of providing me with some modicum of comfort, the thought only worsens my anxiety; the future that was once so distant is now slowly starting to materialize. The idea of graduation still feels like a figment of my imagination. It’s as if I’ve become untethered to reality, unable to accept the inevitable. I can’t graduate now, I don’t know what I’m doing with my life. How do I hold a full-time job in finance when I don’t know any finance? Oh god, I haven’t retained any knowledge from these past four years. I’m a fraud. But strangely, in spite of all this, I feel okay. I feel grounded. I feel whole for the first time in a long time because I know in some way or another, I’ll figure it out like I always have.
For most of my life, I was terrified of uncertainty. I needed to have everything figured out – to have a plan A, followed by B, C, and D. Nothing could be left up to chance. But one of the best things in life is to be still and ponder the “what ifs.” Because to know would be to commit, to know would be to admit. So for once, I let myself walk the fine line. To tip toe at the boundaries. To be still and wonder at the possibilities of what could be. And as I’m promenading through the campus that I’ve called home for the last three years, listening to Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well” as leaves fall in a carpet of red and gold around me, I have a feeling that this might just the beginning of everything.