...In which our heroine forgets and is yet destined to remember.

WOXY is currently playing Feist's "My Moon, My Man," a recent favorite. They're only about 20 songs into the countdown, and it's ridiculous how many of them I know all the words to. 

These are the songs that taught me how to love music and have been through my entire adolescence as it drags on. I use these songs to contextualize my life, where I was in my life when I heard a particular song for the first time. For instance, last year, I heard little of the countdown because I was too busy slinging slop at Bob's and being a trixie, but "My Moon, My Man" was one of the songs I took from that countdown. The year before that, grandma was in the hospital, but I managed to take "The Bachelor and the Bride," and now The Decemberists are one of my favorite bands. 

I can tell you where I was the first time I heard "Bela Lugosi's Dead," "Personal Jesus," "Black Metallic," "Psycho Killer" - all the songs that have defined my life so far. I just re-read Love is a Mix Tape by Rob Sheffield and that is the best book ever written about what it means to love music, what it means to equate songs with memory. 

Jay Bennett died yesterday and so I had to give Yankee Hotel Foxtrot a spin, as much as I didn't want to. It was one of the previously mentioned albums for this year, but I haven't been listening to it much lately. The first time Ben spent the night, that's what we listened to, and it has been really hard to listen to since. But I listened yesterday, and as sad as it made me, it was good because ironically enough, Bennett's death made me reclaim that album. It was there before Ben, and it's here after Ben. For a brief moment, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot belonged to us on a too-small dorm mattress, face to face, breathing in each other's air, wrapped up in the body of the other. But us is now me and him, and now it belongs to us as individuals - we are free to do or not do what we wish with it.

That's the remarkable thing about music, or any pop culture for that matter, but mostly music. Songs or bands become synonymous with people in your life, but whether the people go or stay, the music is always around. You can even hide from people, but the music that you associate them with will find you at the most unexpected times. Whether it hurts or heals, the music is there if you want it. Once you've heard it, connected it with a person or a time in your life, you're done for.

And here you go, WOXY is listening to me write this. The current tune is "Need You Around" by the Smoking Popes. The lyric "'I'm gonna feel this way 'til I'm six feet underground/crazy as it sounds, I need you around." This song, but that line in particular was a mantra for this time last year, for what else, another boy. I don't think I've heard this song since that time last year, but here it is, finding me when I wasn't looking for it, and immediately, I go back into the wayback machine. I don't feel the same as this time last year by any stretch about said boy, but the song reminds me that I once did. 

There's the most beautiful part about music, how songs, albums, artists, lyrics become people or times and the memory is compounded forever in your mind. Even if you want to forget it, the music won't let you. But of course it works both ways, and the music makes you remember things forgotten that shouldn't be.

Now: "Could You Be Loved?" by Bob Marley. Now I'm thinking of Gypsy, of fruity tasting tobacco smoke, of steamed up windows from the cold outside, of screaming, of the boys, of menthol cigarettes, of the cantaloupe after-taste of hookah, of 3AM, of Waffle House, of opening the front door as quietly as possible. And I'm back to last winter instantly. Music makes you remember things you want to forget and reminds you of things you shouldn't.