Moody Monday Music

Do you ever listen to songs that remind you of someone you’d rather forget?

One of my fellow bloggers is doing a month of music posts, and recently one of the prompt options was “a song that reminds you of someone you’d rather forget.” He commented that he didn’t know why anyone would want to listen to a song that reminds you of someone you’d rather forget, which is fair enough, except I immediately realized… I have many of those songs.

I have entire playlists of songs that remind me of those kinds of someones.

Not to sound sad, it’s not a sad thing for me, really. And it’s not like I listen to them all the time.

Some of the songs I choose to listen to in certain moments because they’re cathartic. By reminding me of the brokenhearted moments, they simultaneously remind me of the feeling of release, of making it out the other end, of moving forward again, of how far I’ve come since. It’s empowering.

“There’s a part of me wishing that you were still with me but now I’m looking through another lens… maybe if Hell froze over, we could be in love again.”

Some songs — and playlists — became tied in my mind to someone when there were all good vibes, and they became coloured with sadness when things didn’t go as hoped. But I still listen to them sometimes regardless of how I feel about those someones now, because the outcomes were no fault of the songs, which are still perfectly wonderful.

“We fell in love
Right by the ocean
Made all our plans
Down on the sand”

There are even some songs — the most special ones — I listen to because they have magic in them. Music has a strange, nostalgic power to transport you into specific moments. Sometimes, it can even bypass the unhappy endings, slip past the dark shadows of those someones, and drop you right into the happy middles again, reminding you of the good things, the growth, the butterflies, the warmth, and most importantly: the possibility that it can happen again.

(This song is also just too happy to ever make you feel sad.)

So perhaps it’s not entirely true that I would rather forget. Even with the unhappy endings and false starts and unfulfilled hopes, I am grateful for all of these post-divorce* experiences, for the ways I’ve grown, for the happy moments the songs represent, for the someones that helped me move forward and become who I am today.

I play the songs sometimes, when no one else is home, on full blast in the kitchen, and remember, and dance.

Are there specific songs you listen to that have the power to transport you to specific moments or memories?

*(Disclaimer: none of this applies to the “before times” so I suppose there are some songs and one someone in particular I’ve exiled from my inner world. But that’s another story, one I’m done with telling… for now at least.)

Header photo: Mike Giles / Unsplash