There are songs I crave listening on repeat. I’ll find them, they’ll find me. I savor them, like the last bites of a great meal. I won’t let myself listen too often for fear I’ll get sick of them. Eventually though I always do, the novelty wears off and I let them go. 

It’s not that the songs change, but it’s that I change. I inevitably find a new songs to get obsessed with and start to ration those.  I find myself time putting off my joy in the moment to prepare for a time in the future where I really may really need something cozy.  

These songs have been the warm blanket on my gooey heart they’re the sounds I wanted to reach for so far in 2019. I’d turn them on when I was ready to turn on my emotions. They were my companions for feeling rather than suppressing, distracting, or coping which is what I did most of the time. 

They’re an eclectic bunch, spanning across genres, eras, and popularity but the through line is that I craved them on repeat.

There’s an essay by Josh Radnor where he writes about discovering an album that becomes so meaningful to him that he feels ownership over it, as it slowly becomes a mainstream hit. He writes about removing his headphones to make people listen to Damien Rice’s seminal O album the year he discovered it after a particularly rough breakup. 

I’d read it years ago and the piece didn’t land on me then, at least not like it did when I reread it this summer, after he mentioned it to me a couple times. 

As soon as I read it I knew why, I was hit hard by the way he articulated the feeling of heartbreak as, 

 “. ...something vital to my physical and emotional well-being had been surgically removed, as if I was suddenly missing a leg.”

Years ago when I first read it hadn’t yet felt what he described. Now I understood that intense sensation and how music (and all art really) can be extra potent when you’re in a hyper-emotional state.   

His essay mirrored my experience with my first adult heartbreak with extreme accuracy down to the antidepressant prescription sitting on my desk. By reading this *soft story* he wrote five years ago, I felt less alone in the one that I was living. Everyone told me time would help, but reading how dark things got for him and knowing he came out the other end made me feel like I could too in a way no other breakup advice hadn't assured me.

At the end of the essay, he talks about even feeling nostalgic for his first major heart break at 28. 

“One can both mourn a time being gone forever and be grateful that time is over. Youth is funny that way: We worship and miss it and want it done and gone all at the same time.” 

It’s hard to believe I might be nostalgic for this first heartbreak someday… but who knows.  I feel connected to the world listening to songs and knowing the feelings I experience most people have felt, have made art about, and have moved through...so I can too.