16 Music is Life

Do you remember what it felt like 10, 20 years ago? The things that consumed your thoughts, the dreams that plagued you? How ‘teen angst’ felt so heavy in your chest but how come you also feel like you’re floating to the void the fragile connections you have to safety and stability slowly disappearing, and you don’t know how to bring it back…

I’m currently immersed in a playlist of songs I used to listen about a decade ago. It’s surreal how music wakes up memories, how it can bring you back to a time and place, or a sense of feeling. I remember hearing with one song when I was with my high school friends, lying down on an open field, naming constellations, and promising to stay present in each others’ lives… now, we exist mostly in each other’s network of facebook connections.

Song after song, a memory surfaces for 3–4 minutes, dancing just in front of you, your eyes glazed in reminiscence, a scowl or smile ghosting over your face. These days there’s almost unlimited memory in cloud-based severs that it can store (probably has in store) all of the songs you have ever listened to in your life. And within these songs, little snippets of yourself rise to the surface of your consciousness. How many songs do you think it would take to remember your whole life? Is there a way to store these personal stories and memories that isn’t degraded in trying to transcribe it?

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