The Book of Love
Spotify did a wonderful thing this year by compiling a playlist of all our top songs of 2016. And as I listened to my playlist this week, I caught myself finally tapping back to some of the best/worst moments of this year: The blurry scenery of Upstate New York from a Greyhound bus with tears in my eyes and "Sunburn" by Ed Sheeran playing in my ears, a hurried morning walk across the slippery snow of Ames, Iowa, to "Weak" by Wet, a purposeful plane ride at a time when I was sure I was almost in love, to "Roses" by Lunatic Wolf.
As I approach the end of 2016, I realize I've barely written about my life the way I used to, and I also realize I haven't because it's been loud in ways it wasn't before turning 24. In a bunch of other ways, I suppose I opted to live it than to record it. Maybe because it was both complicated and wonderful, laced with ribbons of pain with bright silver linings, and riddled with so much ancillary beauty. Yet when this memorable year ends, those memories fade a little, and I catch myself one evening standing in the snack aisle at a CVS deciding between Oreos or a bag of trail mix, I know a song like "Revelator Eyes," by The Paper Kites will come on, and I'll stop everything I'm doing and imagine myself back in that time of my life when that song colored absolutely everything. And I know I'll miss having recored what little I could when it was still relevant for the celebration of those small meaningful moments of nostalgia that make up life. After all, we rarely realize the value of certain experience until they've just become memories.
So I decided the way I'll start tapping back into those memories will be by sharing little short stories/thoughts about a couple of songs I played over and over again this year. Whether they described a feeling I was feeling, a moment I was living, a future I was aspiring to, or whether I just sang the hell out of it in my car. I'm hoping after this I'll have something solid to go back to, and I can tell you the longer story. Songs color memories. They're bookmarks on the dull pages of the everyday, they're white noise on loud thoughts, and I think I'm finally ready to hit play.
This year was the first time in my life I ever felt like I "could be" in love. Not the way they show in the movies, or the way I know people in my life have been (as I never really did), yet it was the first time I ever felt like I could. This song is special to me for many reasons, yet I find it difficult to explain my affinity for it. First, it's the song I listened to most of the summer on my way to and fro Downtown Syracuse to the East End Barnes and Nobles, as I walked home from college on still frigid afternoons in May, and as I navigated feelings of loss and indifference towards a relationship that could've been.
In many ways, I think the point of the song is to show that love is not rational, it’s tedious to talk about, yet pure enough that "I love it when you read to me, and you can read me anything." And that is what it feel like it's ultimately all about: losing the idealistic in hopes of embracing headlong the cumbersome, sometimes banal, sometimes unflamboyant parts in all of it and realizing that's what makes it real anyway. The dull mornings of bills and to-do lists, as well as the fixed palm on thighs; the midnight hospital visit and the smell brewing coffee in the mornings, the quiet glances across the room from over books, and the slow dance in the kitchen. I still get goosebumps every time I listen to it.
As I look back, I peg my love for it as having shown me that girl of 12 or 14 who used to sit in her room past midnight writing short stories and listening to Hilary Duff idealize a love yet to come. Haha. That girl is me. This year I strayed away enough from her to discovered how easy it is to lose oneself in the hopes of finding oneself in someone else. And this song helped me reclaim some of the childlike innocence I'd lost by my first taste of heartbreak. It showed me the book of love sometimes isn't simple, it's "full of charts, facts and figures, and instructions for dancing" yet sometimes it's just simple enough that "you ought to give me wedding rings." I got my naive back like one finally opens one's eyes to a cold, rainy morning to find that yet flowers bloom in all of it. What a beautiful canvas to start all over again of “things we're all too young to know."