Looking back always brings up nostalgia, but there’s almost an eerie magic seeing your former selves through your favorite songs.
I delved into 500+ liked songs on my Spotify, and it felt like I dug up bones. Some are fractured, weathered by emotional hurricanes, while some remain smooth. Regardless of state, I do see every moment like it was yesterday unearthing them — relationships come and gone, aesthetic experimentation, and an even lesser sense of identity than I know today.
Welcome to Part I: the years 2015–2019, and the older layer I’ve unearthed.
The playlist, sorted from oldest date added, grapples me back into my early- and mid-20’s seeing fall 2015. My ligaments rot on the couch once more, reliving the week straight I spent in my mom’s basement un-showered before starting depression/anxiety treatment. The general heaviness and aches within my body grow. New-med nausea contorts my stomach into a pretzel all over again.
I putter down Memory Lane seeing Warrant and FireHouse — my first situationship. (In hindsight, it was a bit creepy that he found my Facebook after walking past me at their show.) I remember feeling limerence cloaked as love the first moment I saw him.
My hand shakes from laughter after wiping purple lipstick remnants off him at our first meeting. (Faster Pussycat…how romantic.) His hand squeezes mine while we laugh at a horror movie on our first actual date. His body swallows me whole on a Quality Inn mattress another night after a show he played. Nestled into each curvature of his muscles, I childishly think this is forever.
Big shock: it wasn’t. I definitely was smitten, though, as my first liked song is “I Promise You” by Backstreet Boys among other sappy love songs. And of course a playlist of saved sappy love songs rooted from a FireHouse show has to include FireHouse’s biggest ballads: “When I Look Into Your Eyes”, “Love of a Lifetime”, and “You Are My Religion”.
Black Veil Brides dot the playlist after my friend’s passing from cancer at the end of 2015. That band was her life blood. Many adventures of hers/ours (including my two weeks on Warped Tour) involved them somehow. When they asked in the “In the End” chorus, “Who will tell the story of your life?” I promised it would be me for her.
Even over a decade later, I’m choked by grief at the holidays. Wretched and Divine: The Story of the Wild Ones plays more often two days before Christmas than carols the entire Christmas season. (I met her after that album came out.) I haven’t decorated for Christmas since 2015 when I put up a small tree before her passing. But I do still play all their old tunes to remember her.
Flash to 2016. Wind gusts through my hair driving to a former fling/friend an hour away during the Poconos summer. There’s a whole Shania Twain compilation saved in that era since she was a go-to listen since childhood. (Don’t tell me “I’m Gonna Getcha Good” isn’t good driving music; you’re wrong.) The timeline walkway brings me through our future eight years of friendship after — dry inside jokes, chosen family holiday parties blasting Dokken or Alice Cooper, and concert nights together.
Once 2017-2019 hits, the memories feel the lightest they probably ever did at that point.
2017 takes me back to my first relationship. The two of us, wedding party-ready, morph into a dancing purple and tan swirl. Foreheads touch and hands clasp, amorous glistens in our eyes tingling throughout our bodies. “Our song” was “I See the Light” from Tangled; that first dance together felt like we were surrounded by the lanterns, us alone.
We spin and fall onto the coarse futon cushion in our first apartment in 2018. That apartment led us to our chosen family in the indie wrestling world. (Ex trained and eventually wrestled.) Constant trips for ring crew load-in and breakdown seemed to call for a lot of Adam and the Ants, Paul Stanley solo stuff, and Survivor for some reason. We obviously split turns on the radio, though…which was generally a lot of metal, me casually speeding, and him anxiously clinging for his life.
Along with the indie wrestling, we wrestled his knee injury, physical rehab, and the start of new home renovations/preparations in 2019. New floors and walls were christened by curses, sweat, and tears for months. It was hard work, and it sucked. Everything seemed promising in the future nonetheless.
And it was…until 2020 came.
Stay tuned here for part two of this essay drifting to The Soft Sea Witch soon.
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