Music has always been an immensely important thing to me. When I’m going through a good time, I’ll attach those happy memories to the songs I listen to at the time. When I’m going through a hard time, I go searching for new music to attach new memories to. Sometimes sad feelings get attached to happy songs, and vice versa. Sometimes I’ll discover music I love when I’m happy. No matter how it happens, I’ve got a lot of songs that have a very strong emotion attached to them. More often than not, the negative emotions end up stronger than the positive ones. Whether that’s therapy session worthy or not, I don’t really know, nor do I really care. Anyways, where I was going was that good songs, even ones I’ve got happy memories tied to, like to come back from nowhere and make me cry.
As long as I can remember, ironically enough, my memory has been terrible. I’ll remember bits and pieces, and my family will ask me if I remember stuff from years ago, long enough that it’s not recent, but still recent enough that I should remember it. More often than not, I’ll just not remember it at all. Like someone asking me about a book I haven’t read, I just don’t have any memory of it. It sucks, but it somehow doesn’t upset me, until I do remember something. One of the things that sets me off is music.
Dumb as it is, when I struggled to sleep a while back, I tried listening to the lullabies I used to listen to when I was really little. Boy was that a mistake, I ended up listening to one or two of the songs and crying myself to sleep instead. The songs brought back memories of when I just felt safe, and happy. At the time, I was… not. I was stressed about something or other, and things were just complicated.
Fast forward to today, I’ve thrown myself back into the same situation. Back in 2019/2020, I got into Cavetown a bit. Okay, more than a bit, but not tooo much. Right around when I got into his music, Covid 19 hit. Along with the rest of the planet, I got stuck inside, not being able to hang out with my friends in person. Although for me, “stuck” is a bit wrong. I was right at home, being allowed to just explore the internet, and spend my days sleeping, waking up, and playing with my friends on minecraft, or valorant, or fortnite, or whatever. It was simple, and I was happy. As happy as I’d ever be, or at least would ever be for a long time, as it turned out. All I needed to worry about was not sleeping too late, and making sure my computer was charged. During this time, I Listened to a variety of things, like Wilbur Soot’s music, a mix of different lofi songs, and of course, Cavetown. I remember laying on my back, on call with my friends, with those songs playing in the background, talking about whatever we were working on. Programming, gaming, or girls we were talking to.
Now back to tonight. Just… fuuuuuuuuuck. I downloaded some of Cavetown’s music from back then, and a bit before writing this, gave a few songs a listen. Since then, I’ve been struggling to keep myself from crying so I can keep writing. This whole thing is just a mess of confusing feelings, and the newly added estrogen isn’t helping the mix. Those ages were awful, for so many people, but they were the best months of my life. I’m so happy, because they’re such good memories, and it’s amazing that I got to have those experiences. But it’s sad, becaus I don’t think I’ll ever be that happy again. There’s so much stress in my life now, so much drama, so many people I have to keep secrets from, sometimes to save my life. I’m afraid of letting people know the real me, because I don’t know how they’ll react. Every time I listen to one of these old songs, I get a wave of emotions, memories, reminders about how things have changed so, so much.
I’ve managed to get this far without crying, but I’m not getting my hopes up too much. Honestly, realizing how different things are is just… scary. I think it’s for the best if I keep these songs in my rotation, so the effect gets diluted a bit. But for now, I’m gonna go lay on my floor for a little while.
rock on,
stay caffeinated.
