Spotify has a feature where you can see the current listening activity of the people you are mutually following. Sometimes I send screenshots to my friends when I catch them listening to songs I also like, or if I catch them listening to Pitbull on a Tuesday at 3am for some reason. There are people I was only slight acquaintances in high school that I knew I would never talk to after we graduated, but I still know that they listen to Long Live (Taylor’s Version) a concerning amount of times, and then there are people who I see listening to the playlists we made together. Ultimately, this feature is like a high resolution telescope pointing in the wrong direction— we can see such an intimate part of each others’ lives, but it means nothing without context.
I only know you through your Spotify friends listening now. You’re always listening in the later hours of the night, when everyone else has signed off and it is just us, listening to any range of music at 2 in the morning. I wonder if you are also speed-writing a final paper. I wonder if you are also playing slow songs while sobbing at your desk. I wonder if you choose angry songs when you feel messed up. I wonder if you see my listening and wonder about me like I do you.
Looking through your playlists is second nature now. You’re the only other person who puts work into the names and descriptions and I read the quirky vague phrases and pretend we never cut contact, that I can message you right now to ask about questionable song choices. I’ve heard you’re in a completely different place now, all apart from any of your friends or family back in the north. The friend I talk to daily talks to you daily. My mom was best friends with your mom. I was best friends with your younger sister. I was best friends with you.
At our town’s small coffee shop before you left for undergrad, we talked for some time. I wonder if you knew how much I looked up to you. I could never see any flaws, and there were some, but I could never pinpoint them. When the rain battered against the window, I sipped at the mediocre coffee and listened to you talk about your regrets with college applications, and I could feel your deep-rooted sadness like it was a tangible monster brushing its claws around us in our little corner. Swallowing, I tried valiantly to muster up the words that would successfully throw all the admiration I felt to you, but my immaturity and bumbling youth was only able to create a wooden sword. I watched as the monster simply absorbed it into its abyssal belly.
There was not much different about this talk than our other ones, but it felt like I was scraping myself bare. You remained cool and collected as always but I like to think you also felt rubbed raw. We skirted around words like “depression” and “anxiety” and “mental health” because we had grown up immigrant Korean American and they might as well have been slurs. Yet in our roundabout, twisted way, we discussed our experiences with them more deeply than any psychologist could.
You know, when you feel like, it just doesn’t stop… does it ever stop?
I think it will get better. I feel like it gets better, knowing I’ll be away from here. But I’m not sure.
Sometimes I don’t think it will end. I can’t see it getting better no matter what good things come my way in the future.
Well… we just have to hold out hope. I wish I could give you better advice. I can’t.
Maybe in the future, when we’re both fully out of this place, we can look back and see.
Yeah.
You admitted to me that you copy pasted the same “Why [insert college name]” for every application, and that I should not do the same. I did not ask why you made such a foolish choice, because I knew: that’s what “it” does to a person. With no one else could I use the word “it” to mean everything without ever once clarifying. Eldest Korean daughters, considered the most likely to succeed by the (too) tight knit Korean community in this (too) sleepy town, both with the emptiness beneath our retinas that we could only see if we looked in a mirror or in each others’ eyes. To us, “it” meant the low thrum of anxiety, never ending parental pressure, the ever bearing weight of personal ambition, having our respective generational depression fall to us, and everything in between. I find myself searching for that unspoken communication on what “it” means with others every day. But maybe “it” meant something completely different to you. I would not know.
The truth is, time has smoothed out all memories of you. In my mind, there are no sharp moments, no rough patches. They have all been sanded away, leaving an ideal friendship that I clutch onto like a dehydrated mad woman sucking at a straw, a couple drops refilled every once in a while by my obsessive checking of your Spotify profile. I admit, obsession is the correct word, but not the derogatory connotations it comes with. Yes, I can name the songs and artists you currently listen to most often, but that is all I know of you.
We have no contact, no other social media, the only indication that we even knew each other is through this damned music streaming app. Lately you’ve been on a movie album phase, and I wonder what listening to the Oldboy and The Handmaiden soundtracks invoke in you. Have you been watching what I’m listening to? Did you maybe watch Succession because I added the theme song to my latest playlist? I mindlessly scroll through your account when I am struggling with late night deadlines, thinking that if I look hard enough between the lines of music, I will be able to tilt my binoculars to actually get a glimpse of how you are actually doing.
The final minutes of our coffee shop conversation ended with me rolling up my long sleeves, placing my wrist on the table, and asking again, redundantly, if it’s ever too much for you as well. You fiddled with your sleeve, commented that we were both starting to tear up and that it was a sign to go. I’m sorry about that. Maybe I did place too big of a burden on you, making you my best friend and role model and subject of unwavering admiration when you too, were still so young. I wonder if you realize you need to forgive me for that.
Whenever I listen to Charli XCX I think of you. Whenever I drink mediocre coffee when it’s raining I think of you. Whenever I feel “it” creeping back, though at a much lower level now that I am out of that town, I think of you, and if you have also beaten “it” back. And whenever I open Spotify I think of you, listening to music the same time as me across the country, growing and having experiences that I am no longer privy to.
I hope you hurt a little. I hope you hurt a lot. I hope you’ve looked through my playlists.
The Tributary 