Oct. Continued: Sound & Memory

CW: Personal accounts of grief, loss

Another autumn is upon us and with it, another Taylor Swift album. It was only less than a year ago when she rolled out the rerelease of Red (Taylor’s Version), an event that was met with mania, particularly surrounding the highly-anticipated 10-minute version of All Too Well. I participated in this mania myself during a Thursday night midnight listening party with a couple of friends in DC. With her recent new record, Midnights, Taylor is now quickly becoming a seasonal staple for pop-lovers, as constant as the leaves falling and the temperature dropping. The release, however, symbolized something more personal for me— the bookend to a year gone by without a childhood friend of mine.

When Red (Taylor’s Version) released last November, my friend had only been gone a couple weeks. I was existing between the initial news and the funeral, a liminal, fragile period of time where anything and nothing can trigger a response, where the air feels like pin needles and I, untethered, floating in it. I hadn’t recalled until I was a few glasses of wine in, sprawled on the rug, surrounded by college friends in my house, how viscerally this album was able to transport me back to high school. I had intentionally not listened to the older version in the months leading up to the rerelease, hoping to give myself as clean a slate as possible. This ultimately meant that the last time I had really engaged with the record in any meaningful way had been back in high school, upon its initial release, with different friends in a different city.

The memories came quick and fast. Flashes of my old Honda Accord and the neon green AUX cord that frayed at the end, requiring a strategic, careful placement into a cupholder of whoever’s iPhone 5 was in use. Five or six girls piled in, crooning and wailing the lyrics of numerous popstars of the 2010’s. I don’t recall where we were headed as much as I do the journeys themselves. Probably, we were on our way to the local ice cream joint where I held a part-time job (it was a cyclical process- I got paid, I bought their ice cream, repeat), or to the high school for some after school rehearsal, or to the river, or to the city, or to someones house. But I do vividly recall the singing, the requests to turn up the volume, the car-ography, and the laughter. I remember how much fun I was having.

The truth is that the memories I’ve kept from high school have significantly dwindled in clarity, in substance. They are fragmented, full of holes. And candidly, I don’t visit them very often, preferring to linger on more recent pasts or dwelling on the disquieting future. I haven’t bothered to care for or maintain most of them. These memories exist today more as feelings, as flashes of pride or helplessness, belonging or isolation. They survive through the camaraderie built with my high school friends, centered around the itch to grow up; a camaraderie that has mostly faded with time and distance. But more than anything, these memories live in the music that played in the background of our lives, through the speakers of that beat-up Honda as we drove through our hometown with little fear, or even regard, for the future.

Once the shock of my friend’s death had cemented, I turned towards the dilapidated state of my teenage memories with guilt and blistering shame. Suddenly, I was grasping for clear recollections, hoping they would come like scenes in a film. It stemmed certainly from the desperation for denial, to revert back into my mind and watch the movie of my past and for a short time, pretend like this nightmare wasn’t happening. I tried to remember every word of our last conversation, a mutually drunk phone call made several months prior, asking for bar recommendations and affirming our slurred continuous love for one another. Or the last time I’d seen her, at a downtown brunch spot the year before that. But beyond this, the richest, most important moments of high school were foggy. I had the panicked urge to dig through them, dust them off and give them a proper revisit.

I’ve only lost a few people in my life. I suppose I’m lucky in that way, though that feels wicked to say. Mostly because two of them were far too young, far too ready for their own futures. The first, occurring in college, had been completely nuclear. Up until that point, I had only ever conceived of death in very uniform circumstances. Grandparents and one day, parents. Aging celebrities or politicians. This new kind of death, I had never conceived of. This loss, of someone young and safe and integral to my life, felt like a betrayal of my own instincts. A cruel trick of the universe. However, until last year, it remained in my mind an anomalous trick, an arbitrary betrayal. Outside forces reinforced this too. A young death is so grippingly painful, everyone around you, desperate to feel like they know anything about how life works, assures in melodic unison: this is rare, this kind of thing will never happen again.

It was the second loss, two years later, that laid down the cold, numb blanket of knowing. They were wrong. This kind of thing would happen again. And it won’t just be grandparents or faded famous people. It would be everyone, at any age or time. This was the tipping point away from innocence, away from denial. This was the truth. And it was all the more important, therefore, to perform this sort of memory excavation. I knew from the first time around that happy memories were sometimes the only thing you could cling to in your despair. But it had been easier then— the memories had been recent, better documented, fresh. It had felt as if he’d in fact left in the middle of the memory-making party. This time, the situation was different. At the moment of her departure, this friend had not been a consistent presence in my life for a while. She was more of a foundational piece, an emblem of my personal history, a cherished symbol of my past. Once a main fixture, now a guest star. I recall a feeling I hadn’t felt the first time around: an timidity in my grief, or rather an uncertainty about whether I should be allowed the same space to grieve as my friends who’d stayed closer to her over the years. To her college friends whom I didn’t know but probably considered her a vital, main fixture in their current lives. I was much lonelier this time.

The excavation process was difficult. Scrolling through my camera roll, I was dismayed at my past self’s refusal to document anything important or emotionally meaningful. What am I supposed to do with mirror selfies and pictures of my old dog? With texts that read “I’m here” and “what time is rehearsal?” I spent a lot of time beating myself up; for not being a better photographer, a better texter, a better friend. For not regarding those years as precious until now. So as I lay drunk on my floor, weeks after losing her, silently and solitarily wallowing, my ears pricked up at the melody of an old acoustic guitar riff. “Holy Ground”— upbeat and nostalgic. Sandwiched in-between two of my least favorite tracks, which meant it went largely ignored by my high school self. Taylor is looking back on her memories with a presumed old flame: ‘Cause darling, it was good / Never looking down / And right there where we stood / Was holy ground. To me, the lyrics read as a confession. As if, after some resistance to the idea, she could finally admit that those old days had been good days, despite them being over now. Despite neglect or falling outs or growing apart. The old song unearthed new detailed memories of laughing and dancing in someone’s basement. I felt the tears come and it felt good to cry. They weren’t tears of frustration, but of memory, clear and true and good.

A year later, Midnights arrived in all its typical Swiftie fanfare. And it was the 3am Version that struck me another blow. In a bonus track, “Bigger Than The Whole Sky”, I almost laughed at how resonant her lyrics were: Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye / You were bigger than the whole sky / you were more than just a short time / I’ve got a lot to pine about / I’ve got a lot to live without / I’m never gonna meet what could’ve been, would’ve been, should’ve been you. In fact, I did laugh. How can she keep kicking me when I’m down?! Her lyrics pierced what felt like very freshly healed scar tissue. Reminding me again of who was listening to this album and who was not. Who could not. The loss of a person who would’ve loved this era of teenage pop renaissance, of Taylor and Rihanna and Beyoncé all stepping back out onto the global stage. In my memory, she co-exists with their music, so closely associated with my own sensory construction of those early years.

There is a pervasive melancholy that accompanies the release of these albums. Underneath the thrill of new music, the delight of dissection, a voice inside reminds me of those who aren’t here to thrill and delight beside me. There comes a strange point in the process of grief where it is clear that the outside world has not stopped, that it continues to barrel through. Listening to my personal Red (TV) favorite bonus, “Nothing New” (ft. Phoebe Bridgers <3), I found myself in the same muted, panicked paradigm: I’ve had too much to drink tonight / And I know it’s sad but this is what I think about / I wake up in the middle of the night / And I can feel time moving. New movies come out, new music is released. Artists are discovered and sports teams defy odds and sometimes even global pandemics break out. Every time something big happens, I think of my dead friends. I wonder what they would’ve thought, what they would’ve said.

Renaissance hit especially hard. You were hard-pressed to find a bigger Beyoncé fan than her. Beyoncé’s lyrics were even recited at her funeral. Not 10 months later, her 7th album is released with unprecedented fanfare and adoration— how is that fair? How does that make any sense? What’s worse is that this was a dance album. She was a beautiful dancer, this friend of mine. I actually first met her not in school, but through a dance capacity. Early middle school, she and I were part of two different youth performing arts groups, hers dance-oriented, mine theatrical. The two troupes were collaborating on a performance for a city-sponsored Fourth of July celebration downtown and she was a lead dancer at the tender age of 11 or 12. She led the pack while I stumbled in the back corner, wishing I could forego the choreography and simply sing my harmony. Later, as high school friends, I watched her every week as she led our school’s dance team during pep rallies and halftime performances. She moved with ease and joy. It was a marvel to watch. She even coached me personally as my dance captain during my brief stint in show choir. In my memories, she was always dancing, and always encouraging me to join her. Always pulling me out of my droopiness, scolding my posture, demanding I move like I mean it. She undeniably shaped who I am in that way, forcing me to move when I didn’t feel like moving. Attempting to pull me out of my self-induced fog and set my body free.

Music is better when enjoyed together. The release parties, the Twitter banter, the cultural mania— in the midst of so much collective anxiety and loss and rage, these releases are a chance to detach, to float, to dance. To relish in art and beauty and joy. Beyoncé herself described the new album as “a place to scream, release, feel freedom”. The songs are jubilant, reclamations of power, of joy in times of sorrow. And it begged the personal question: is it appropriate, and more importantly possible, to dance through the pain? When an album and an artist reminds you so much of a grief-shadowed past, of a person gone, how could I dance when the dancing queen herself was not here? I struggled with it. I avoided the album at first, content with the excuse that I’d just moved to India and was far too busy. But as Beyoncé’s music does, it seeped into every one of my algorithms and it was good. And one day, alone in my room, I allowed myself to dance. I missed her. I wished she could be somewhere across the world, dancing too. This music didn’t bring back any old memories— it was the beginning of a new chapter of the grief. Celebrating the fact that she, once, was here and if she were here now, I think she would want me to dance to her favorite artist. And because she is not here now, maybe it is all the more imperative that I got off my ass and started moving.

I’m thankful for the return of the 2010 pop stars. I’m grateful for how reminiscent they too seem to be about the past they share with their fans. Swift’s songs are stained with bittersweet memory, echoing a girlhood that I am mourning. Beyoncé’s music is pushing me forward into an uncertain future. Both evoke memories, feelings of which I am more protective now. Over these tumultuous few years, a period marked by loss, I have become a better custodian to my memory. Searching for significance in the overlooked mundanity, turning over every photo and video and message. I don’t know what I’m looking for. But I know that my memories have become sacred to me, holding hidden knowledge about what it means to be alive. Capable, even, of a kind of resurrection. My friends are gone from this present world, but not from my memory. There they reside, living and breathing, singing and dancing. And it is the pop music of my past that helps me find them again. Coming home safely. Calling shotgun. Beckoning me to the dance floor for one last song: Tonight, I’m gonna dance / Like you were in this room / But I don’t wanna dance / If I’m not dancing with you.