My discography is as daring as it is damaging to the psyche of reminiscence. Playlists I’ve curated are one moment relevant and the next fleeting, like the emotions and people behind them. The years I have spent amid youthful obsession, in the throws of candid crushes, are captured in a brief list of seemingly mundane melodies. Yet, the songs I choose to clump together into one seemingly coherent playlist, are anthems of my affection. Though ridiculousness only flourishes in retrospect, the chords, melodies, choruses, and verses reflect memorable moments, equal parts ardent and transient. With the simple press of my thumb on my phone’s screen, I am whisked back into a frenzy of flashbacks. There are moments I have both forgotten the precious sensation and form of, yet scenes that I work hard to grasp onto, never forgetting the simplicity of an emotion, a smile, or a graze of an arm, that makes me wish to relive the comforting foolishness of juvenescence once again. Personal, poetic, and at times crude and poorly crafted, my playlists are my pain and passion, my heart and heartache, the loved and unloved. In short, my playlists are the melodic Yin and Yang of love’s many intense contradictions, ones that leave us pleased and pained, romantic and run over, yet coming back all the same, just to grasp at feeling the spark of hope that manifests in the face of another.
1-“Road Trip Jam$”
I thought I was so cool, undeniably trendy when I replaced the “S” with a dollar sign. My current crush had to think that I was creative, if not living a bit on the grammatical edge, between a good speller and a purposeful grammatical baddie. He was 16 and Mormon. I was 14, homeschooled, desperate, and oblivious to the predicament that strict religious sects would bring. I met him at my ice rink training for my supposed days of regional championship glory. He was an ice dancer and I was a single skater. He transfixed me with the litheness of his form. I always looked forward to pretending to engage in warm-up stretches with him. I didn’t care if my calves were improperly warmed up. My heart was perfectly warm. He had perfect brown hair, deep brown eyes that drove my heart to exceeding levels of palpitation, and drove a small gray Fiat. I made this playlist for him to listen to as he was driving with his partner, my gal pal, to a figure skating competition in Maryland. Complete with Maroon 5, Billy Joel, Aerosmith, Queen, and The Beach Boys, “Road Trip Jam$” was grunge and rock in aesthetic, but the connection we sustained over 80s rock induced all the feels in my 14-year-old body. I felt absolutely over the moon when he sent me a follow-up text about Maroon 5 with a winky face. While we never got together, we never parted in pain nor in harsh feelings.
2-“POV: The Relationship You’re in When You’re Fourteen”
I made this playlist as I was graduating high school, still holding onto confusing emotions from my first love. Was it that I still desperately sought to be with him and only him, or was it that he was a figural manifestation of a time in my life whose comforting simplicity had passed me by? Was he a man who manifested a time that I wished to return to or was it love I had forced to succumb to the depths of self-initiated and self-disciplined ignorance? My first love was everything to me. He was an Italian-American boy, a chef in training who had won Chopped Jr. at just 12-years-old. I had met him through my mother, a massage therapist. His mom was one of my mom’s clients. He had shiny brown hair and deep dark brown eyes. I found an endearing nature in his date attire of sweatpants, Adidas flip-flops, and the radiating warm smell of his Axe Body Spray. Together, in trepidation and tenderness, we simply had fun. The beautiful thing about my relationship with him was that I never focused on achieving an ideal or checking off items on a relationship list. I purely yearned, in a youthfully obsessive and starry-eyed manner, to simply be close to him.We ate candlelight dinners at farm-to-table restaurants — our lips often dripping with excess grease and ice cream, and cheered on The University of Michigan’s men’s basketball team. This playlist is one of my comfort romance playlists. It is one I have not relegated away gladly to the depths of my forgetfulness. With a mix of Phil Collins, Billy Joel, Olivia Rodrigo, Bon Jovi, Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran, and a random mix of indie and oldies, the diversity of this playlist perfectly captures the rollercoaster of sensations and scenes that was our relationship. There are times when this playlist is a mix of melodic reminders that feel all too real of the past and I must simply press pause for I am, in those moments, afraid of wanting to desperately live in a snapshot that has already surpassed me, instead of my present moment.
3-“Forgetting Him”
I also made this playlist when I graduated high school. It was, in a way, a follow-up to “POV: The Relationship You’re in When You’re Fourteen.” Graduation was exciting, yet in those moments of pride that washed over me, I felt body slammed by adulthood. I wanted to hold onto the moments of my life that were easy in their youth and comforting in their dependency on family and friends. I felt sad at the prospect of gaining distance between my youth and independence. I felt that I was, in desperation, attempting to grasp onto the days of mistakes, missteps, and a certain kind of idiocy that had rather moronic, wonderfully unsubstantial consequences. The sadness that went into this playlist had more to do with feeling a certain melancholia of losing the safety of youth. The love of my youth was a taste of adulthood within the confines of my teenage safety net. It proved I could be an adult but rest solely in my youth simultaneously. It felt near impossible now that I was about to embark on an expedition of independence. This playlist reflected the loss of a love in how I was feeling about the loss of my youth and childhood. It is a conglomeration of Olivia Rodrigo, Ashe, Tate McRae, Niall Horan, Sara Bareilles, Ed Sheeran, Christina Perri, Coldplay, and more. The loss of a love was the loss of the comfort of the dependability of youth. Adulthood was a submergence into frenzied and fast impermanence. The loss of this love took me back.
4-“Eternal Search For The Soccer Boy”
I made this playlist after Halloween of my freshman year of college. I had been heading out with a friend to an Honors Program Halloween party. I was dressed as a slightly provocative deer and my friend was dressed as David Bowie, pink and red lightning bolt slash across her face and all. We were walking past the on-campus dining hall, to the Honors house off-campus, when I was stopped in my tracks by a slightly-fratty guy calling to me. He was in a group of unmistakable jockish men before he stepped out and told me how much he liked my costume. He asked if I was a reindeer, to which I felt it was important to specify that I wasn’t. I was a deer. He smiled and immediately I was unexpectedly smitten. He had the haircut most frat boys had, shorter on the sides with a slightly curly moppy top. He had brown eyes and had a build that was athletic but not overly so. He wore a team shirt for our university’s soccer team. His physical stature suggested a cocky sort of confidence, a type of confidence that I had never seen nor felt projected at me before. Yet, before I could come up with a flirtatious retort, a rapport that was as sultry as I was awkward, I waved to him and walked away. I felt instantly overcome with regret. What if we had crossed paths for a reason? Was that reason momentary, a flash of my life that was not meant to last, or had I abandoned a moment that had been meant to grasp hold of? This playlist represents the cyclical thoughts I had concerning destiny, moments, and this mysterious soccer man. Who was this curly-haired, flirtatious, athlete, who had swept his eyes over my faux antlers? The songs and artists on this particular playlist reflect how I wanted us to casually meet again, yet for him to see me in a moment that deemed me a slightly chaotic and pinnacle manic pixie dream girl. As such, the playlist has no real coherent theme with artists, but all the songs reflected little moments of fantasy that I injected him into, as I cyclically considered the concept of chance and how likely it was that I would find myself talking to the most unlikely of men again.
5-“The Dark Side of Tacoma”
This is the most infamous playlist from my freshman year of college. I made it for a boy I had fallen head over heels in love with. We had met one frosty September morning, waiting silently, the first ones at the door, for breakfast at the dining hall at 6 A.M. I complimented his colorful tennis shoes and the rest was history. It was a classic scenario of me secretly pining for him and yet he felt that I was such a good friend, that he could unload unresolved feelings about his literally, but perhaps not, emotionally ex-girlfriend. In short, I did anything for him because I would have done anything to have him. He was the complete opposite of many guys I had liked before: He wore jeans, and flannel shirts, and had a shaved head. He had a slight guttural, snarky attitude that strangely attracted me and blue eyes that were both dark and light, deep and shallow. His clothes fit his body perfectly, a sartorial preview to the sinews and muscles beneath. It was a seductive suggestion of form and by extension, desire. I made this playlist inspired by the long night walks he and I took through the seaside Tacoma neighborhoods, sometimes getting lost and always laughing about it. The playlist contains everything from ABBA to Taylor Swift, to The Smiths, Billy Joel, Bruce Springsteen, Elton John, Oasis, The Cure, R.E.M. and other 90s indie alternative music. He was a slightly more snarky Tom Hansen, I was a slightly more dramatic Summer, and our night walks and breakfast tête-à-têtes were our own 500 Days of Summer. The music of this playlist was playful, contemplative, and in itself was a canorous ode to living through the act of desiring what could never be resolved. The songs I arranged displayed the constant state of joy my heart was in, despite being stuck between desire and distress, loving and longing, arousal and abandonment. It was filled with the kind of music that made me relive the night we sprawled out on his bedroom floor, stuck somewhere between flirt and friend. It was a masochistic affair of waiting for the unimaginable, receding until I tried to forget the inevitable. This boy broke my heart after winter break of freshman year. Amidst an unmentioned reunion with his mysterious ex-girlfriend, was a proclamation that indeed ignored me and that we had been through he treated it as if it was substance imagined. Perhaps then he never had to consider a longing that wasn’t for the girl he had sold the soul of his heart to. I will never definitively know if what he felt for me was more than friendship, but a palpable tension between us annihilated simplicity. For him to enact a simple explanation, cutting off all contact, was rousing suspicion. He would always be the boy I tried the hardest to get and the hardest to forget. He was the one who made me call a blanket over my head home, where I could forget the investment in our own universe that was abandoned to the black void of denial.
6-“Let’s Get Artsy Together”
I made this playlist right after I began my first year at CU as a transfer student. I had met a mysterious, undeniably quirky, Master’s student who made me question everything about logic and impulsivity. Clad in colorful geometric shirts, baggy yacht dad shorts, and wire-rimmed glasses, the self-proclaimed “Asian Harry Potter” was a man hard to get out of my mind. I was unexpectedly thrown into a state of heightened emotion, for I never expected someone like him to come into my life during the first semester at a new and huge university. He had a soft, mellow voice, and exuded energy that was more ego than confidence. His hair was dark, black, shiny, and had a soft flop to it. He was artistically obsessed and seemed to contain a multitude of complexes, of which I was enthused to explore. I made this playlist because I wanted to impress him with my knowledge of obscure, artistically original artists. I wanted to seem like I was tortured aesthetically. I wanted him to view me as the kind of girl who would purposefully buy fragmented Doc-Martins and wear men’s shirts just to divert attention. I put everything from The Walters, to Matt Maltese, to Gregory Alan Isakov, to Vampire Weekend, Clairo, Lord Huron, Cat Stevens, and more. I wanted him to walk in on me listening to this music, gazing out the window and we would immediately connect on the depths of the universe, engaging in philosophical foreplay. Yet, all I realized as I curated this playlist and got to know him was how undeniably fake he was and how he manipulated depth for self-gain. He didn’t want to know the secrets of the universe. He wanted to know the secrets of my universe, and yes, that is an innuendo. He was a slick, daydreaming, inventor, who engineered lines so masterfully and concerningly, he made me abandon this playlist to the never listening to pile.
7-“Iced Lavender Tea”
I made this playlist at the end of my freshman year of college. I had been visiting with a friend at an off-campus hipster coffee shop, sharing cups of overpriced tea and coffee. The coffeeshop smelled of freshly roasted beans, and the aesthetic was a comforting light wood and white tile, minimalist and trendy. My friend turned to talk to the barista, a fellow student he knew. The barista was cute, in a natural, rugged way. He had crazy curly brown hair and wore oversized jeans and an old-man sweater that he made work. He looked at me slowly up and down and I blushed. After my friend left, I tentatively joined him on his break and for a few minutes we casually chatted. I nervously continued to gulp down my iced lavender tea, while the crooning notes of an indie song played in the background. He was a senior and I knew I’d never see him again, but the mystery of his presence, the way his rugged features tore unexpectedly at my heart, I knew I had to remember him in some way. The songs on this playlist were all indie. Pretencious songs with pretencious titles and pretencious musical instruments for a man whose bravado and energy that were a casual swag, were pretencious in a heart-wrenching way. I never saw him again, but I still listen to the playlist. A beginning never pursued is an ending without pain.
8-“Shelving Books with Boulder Bookstore Hottie”
I made this playlist the fall of 2021 when I first moved to Boulder and began my gap year. Many days I spent exploring the quiet stacks of the Boulder Bookstore, fishing for a new novel to jump into. I was in limbo, stuck between youth and independence, destinations and degrees. The first time I saw him, I already felt my heart jump into my throat. He was shy. He kept to himself. He had the air of a man who was confident, but not cocky. His hair was short and a dirty blonde, and he had a jawline that would make any sculptor envious. His clothes themselves were not remarkable, but it was the way they fit to his form that made me blush. Everytime I went to the bookstore, my heart skipped a beat. Eventually I worked up the courage to talk to him, and occasionally I would pretend to shop just to stall to get into his checkout line. In those few brief moments, I’d throw out a literary fact or some tidbit about myself that I felt dubbed me attractive in a “I’m not like other girls” kind of way. I offered to let him borrow a book of mine that we had been discussing and on New Years Eve 2021, admist snow and chilly winds, I wore my best off the shoulder shirt, donned my best red lip, and brought it to the store. I had cleverly written my phone number in the cover. While he returned the book and nothing ever came from us, through the weeks of knowing him I collected songs that I had heard playing in the Boulder Bookstore into a playlist, as well as some songs that I felt expressed who I had thought he was- lots of Joni Mitchel, Clairo, Beach House, Shannon & The Clams, Ed Sheeran and Oasis.
Love is complicated, but melodies are not. They simplify the pain, the pleasure, the excitement, and anxiety into a momentary breath of song. The lines, chords, and words live and breathe just as I do and they will always hold moments that the imperfect state of my mind cannot hold onto. They jog my memory and I will always think of how being jogged into cognizance of my past is a gift in my present. The complexity of love both beguiles and aches. It tempts and tortures. It is passion and it is pain. It is smiles and it is tears. Love is light and love is dark. While I may find myself critical, in examining love, I realize that love is tricky. It is fragile and most of all, it is fleeting. We may feel that we are impossible to love or that we will never find love, but it is the inescapable sense that love dodges, that can remind us it is hard to find, we ourselves are not impossible to love. Love is a lot like catching fireflies: The ones who have love have simply been lucky enough to catch it in their hand, holding onto it, so as to not let it fly away. Many of us come up with empty jars and hands. Yet when you finally catch one, hold onto it, even if it is only for a moment, and recognize that momentariness is not a fault of your own, it is nature’s due course.