Best posts made by GreenFlashlight

I found my iPod earlier today. It's full of music that isn't on my phone for mostly Luddite reasons; music I haven't listened to since before Dad died because honestly, when's the last time you listened to an iPod? Yeah, that's about what I figured.

Amused at the nostalgic surprise of the discovery, I took the delightfully tiny machine to the car to listen to as I ran some errands. It's full of old stuff by its nature and mine; stuff from the sixties I inherited a love of from my parents, stuff from the late nineties when I started to actually like music after almost twenty years of not getting the appeal of all those noises, stuff from up to the 2010s when the machine was last relevant. I popped the cord in, and after a moment's annoyance at how quickly it started playing on my car's sound system compared to the dog's age it takes for it to negotiate with my phone, a big doofy grin spread on my face as I waited to hear music I hadn't heard in years.

I no longer remember what the first few songs were, but the fourth one was "Soul Meets Body" by Death Cab for Cutie. It's from one of my favorite albums of all time. The lyrics are clever, the beat is quick and quirky, the bass kinda slaps. I loved this song, but more than that, I'd sincerely argue it is an objectively good song, well crafted by people who understand the science as well as the art of music.

So when I heard it, my face went pale, my heart lurched in my chest, and I started leaking big, fat beads of acrid, fear-scented sweat because (and I don't know if I can convey this to you who weren't there in my skin) I realized not only had I forgotten the song, I'd forgotten the context in which I'd last listened to it and the person I was at the time. Suddenly that song took me back in time ten years to when that tune, and most of the ones surrounding it, were the soundtrack of the biggest, extended mental health crisis of my life: years of misery, driving to this or that patient's residence with that song playing on the car's sound system but me not hearing it because all I could hear was a silent voice in my head urging me to end it all because unhappiness is all I was heir to. It's hard for me to even write about it now; my lips are dry and my pits stink as I think of how that song would be playing as the long sleeves I wore to cover my scars irritated the fresh wounds I'd cut into myself, or the time a package of taco shells on top of the fridge at work once made me flee to the bathroom blinded by tears I didn't want anyone else to see because I knew I'd eaten my last Mexican meal and would be discovered weeks dead in my bathroom, or the time on a family vacation I sneaked out of my hotel room and walked into the ocean to let it take me before the not-quite murdered voice of my conscience told me it would be cruel to make my family wonder without knowing.

Five For Fighting's "Chances" coming on next didn't help.

Now the iPod under the passenger seat of my car. I don't want to throw it away because I'm irrationally terrified of it: this malign time machine might have the power to warp out of my trash can like the haunted doll in a shitty horror movie (to reset itself to a previous point in time, like) to punish me for trying to be rid of it, but if I leave it in the car where it thinks there's a chance I might listen to it again, maybe that will propitiate it enough to not haunt me more fully.

This isn't about me being comically, childishly scared of an iPod. Not really. This is about being ripped out of the present into a nightmare but nevertheless accurate past I would have said, before now, time had softened and dulled the bite of. This is about me wondering in all seriousness if there's such a thing as "the past," or if it's just a different kind of present that can jump out of the bushes and snatch you whenever it wants.

I'm going to go take a shower now and drink some tea until my fingers stop shaking. Jesus.