Two weeks ago, I had to sell my tickets to the SWEAT Tour. Two months ago, I had to break up with someone I thought I was going to marry. Loss is always closer than you think.
It’s safe to say that I have had my fair share of “sad girl autumns,” of weeks, even months, listening to Waiting Room by Phoebe Bridgers, sobbing while I’m driving way too fast on the PCH. Of nights spent letting grief overcome me, listening to songs on repeat — their songs — and wondering if the feeling that swirled around in my head of each and every memory we made together would invade each time I heard the opening chords. I’d listen, again and again, waiting for the images of us dancing together in the kitchen to fade.
Of course, they never do.
Everyone I meet is a song. It’s inevitable: if you know me, care for me, fall in love with me… your fate is sealed in a Spotify playlist with your name plastered across the top. I measure seasons of my life through music. It’s why I love what I do. But oftentimes, this way I love becomes a bit of a curse. I fall in love, and they become a song, and when things reach their inevitable end, I have to face my Spotify playlists and earnestly ask myself what to do. Do I hide the song from my rotation? Do I hide the artist? I can’t hide Phoebe Bridgers because unfortunately, her music is at least 70% of my personality. And I definitely can’t hide anything from the I Saw The TV Glow soundtrack, even if every chord reminds me of the first time we watched it. Music becomes me, and so, each person who flows in and out of my life becomes a song.
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The Opening Number:
The first person who I let truly rip my heart out, who I handed it back to time and time again, who left the deepest scars, gave me 21 hours and 32 minutes of music. 309 songs to think about from a custom playlist we curated over 3 years. Because of that, sometimes he’s Size of the Moon by Pinegrove. Sometimes he’s Guts by Leith Ross. Sometimes, though, he’s Motion Sickness by Phoebe Bridgers. He’d hate that. He told me he hated Phoebe Bridgers. Of course. She’s so mainstream. So, Motion Sickness: I hate you for what you did, and I miss you like a little kid. The most traditionally brutal breakup. You keep coming back to my mind and I will fight like hell, I will try to drown you out. There’s always going to be some part of me that wanders back to that corner of my mind I condemned you to. That 4 a.m. phone call, drunk on the grass in Ireland. But I will try to push it down because, truthfully, you never loved me. Some part of me will always want to know what would have happened if I surrendered to you, to the sound.
I know better now.
Maybe you’re more Letter to An Old Poet now. I’m ready to walk into my room without looking for you.
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The Ballad:
When we met, he was I Melt With You by Modern English. We became friends and I overheard him talking about me and all it took was a split-second daydream and a weekend together to launch myself into a tailspin of infatuation. The song was on my playlist titled “i close my eyes and this is what it looks like,” a manifestation of all the vintage love songs that reminded me of him. Don’t You Want Me by The Human League. Come Monday by Jimmy Buffett. I spent so much time dreaming up this life for us, closing my eyes and letting it feel like something I’d never had, that confronting reality was the last thing on my list. In my head, he was I Melt With You.
We were stopping the world together, getting better all the time. And then I opened my eyes, and you didn't know I loved you, and you were gone. And the world stopped.
I spent months wondering what could’ve been, begging for a chance to spend another minute with him. And he came back, and the feelings lingered and hung in the air in this unspeakable tension that made me cry so hard in my parents’ bathroom that I threw up a little bit. Halfway through his time in my hometown, something clicked, and all of a sudden, you were my ‘tis the damn season by Taylor Swift. The road not taken looks real good now. The tugging feeling in the back of my mind urging me to say something, to ask just maybe if this would have ever happened. Maybe we could have one good week of living out what I’d dreamed up in my head. It always leads to you in my hometown.
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The “I Want” Song:
On My Way from Brother Bear. We used to scream this at sunset, with your Jeep flinging mud up behind us. Tell everybody I’m on my way, new friends and new faces to see. You came into my life in an era with so much new, so it only feels appropriate that you’d be a song embracing change and empowering determination. You’ve always been my rock: the stars I sleep under. You, inevitably, are the song I scream to while we’re breathing in the pine-scented air, surrounded by new friends from every corner of the earth. We’ll leave, we’ll go back to those respective corners, and things will change again. But, regardless: there's nothing like seeing each other again, no matter what the distance between, and the stories that we tell will make you smile.
We’ll circle back and we’ll find each other again under the stars, 5200 feet above sea level. We’ll laugh again. We’ll climb mountains again, certainly. And you’ll forever occupy a warmly nostalgic place in my heart, making good company with quaint mountain towns and Brother Bear and summer nights spent under the stars. This is what life’s about.
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The Reprise:
I haven’t said your name in months. We’ll Never Have Sex. Leith Ross. I want you to love me. I want this. I want to feel wanted by you. There’s something so beautiful about intimacy, but when it’s littered with the worry I’ve carried, as I beg you to depollute me? There will always be that lingering fear that I’m filled with rot. Maybe you could fix me. Suck the rot right out of my bloodstream. I don’t ask what you want from me — you kissed me, just to kiss me but I don’t wonder about your indifference — and I pray you’ll fix something deeply unhealed inside me. I believe that you’re the first good one. I don’t ask. I’ll feel the sickness less and less. I promise. It’s me. It’s me. Let’s just sit a while. I miss you. I miss what you did to make me feel whole when I felt sick beyond repair.
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The Finale:
What song am I? Simple answer: I’m not sure I have one. It’s easy to look back through the lens of a handful of lyrics. It’s easy to boil someone else down to the feelings you’ve had about them, for better or worse. And it’s easy for me to write a piece reflecting on all the versions of people who I’ve observed and analyzed, who I take on as songs and store in my Spotify playlists. It’s harder to look at myself in the mirror and wonder who I might be through a lyrical lens.
It’s a question with an infinite number of answers. Do you mean the version of me that has 1,347 unread emails and begs for a text back from someone who checks their ex’s Life360 location on our dates? That’s Hot Mess by dodie: Why am I so alright to do it again and again? Maybe you’re wondering about the version of me that forgives easily, who texts their ex for advice on their recent breakup, who holds everyone tightly to their chest in hopes that some close contact might help them heal? That part is definitely All My Love by Noah Kahan: If you need me, dear, I’m just the same as I was / It’s all okay, there ain’t a drop of bad blood. Or it’s the part of myself that begs to send a message back in time to the part of me I lost as I grew up and grew polished, the versions of myself that died in evolution, who screams back into the void. Who spent the days after I first watched I Saw The TV Glow in silent, aching mourning, begging I didn’t abandon a beloved version of who I could have become had I not picked this path. Anthems For A Seventeen Year Old Girl.
It’s painful, certainly. To see all that someone is in the art form you love so dearly. For better or for worse.
Music feels like a compass. It leads us back to pieces and parts of people (including ourselves) that we can use to navigate the complexities of life. We are always losing something, aren’t we; we are always looking back, looking for what we no longer have. And if you’re me? You’re always listening to a song that mimics the shape of their shadow that loss has cast on you. It’s the closest thing you can get.
For better or for worse.
“Cuffing season” or “breakup season” or “brat summer” or “sad girl autumn,” or all the seasons of life that lie in between, will always be filled with new losses — even if that is a loss as simple as having to sell your tickets to SWEAT Tour. There will always be a new track that drops to ease your pain, though. If you’re lucky, Charli XCX will release a whole album of remix tracks. There will always be a way to manage the pain.
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