I have always had a connection to music. It started when I was young, with distinct memories of going to my grandparents’ house and hearing music constantly playing in the background. My grandpa especially loved music, though most of the time I had no idea what songs or artists were actually playing. A lot of it came from the 50s and 60s, and he was a huge fan of Elvis Presley.
Whenever we visited, my siblings and I got to choose the next album. We would pull a number from an old butter container, and the number corresponded to either a cassette tape or a vinyl record. I always preferred the vinyls. I loved watching them spin endlessly on the record player. It’s funny how the simplest things can completely fascinate you as a child.
As I got older, my love for music only grew. In fifth grade, I joined my school’s band program. I already knew before the welcome meeting that I wanted to play trumpet, mostly because my dad had played in high school. As the years went on and I moved into high school, I added more instruments to my repertoire. Eventually I learned French horn too, though I practically had to beg my band director to let me switch. He was convinced I would be better suited for baritone, but my stubbornness won in the end.
Around that same time, my school started a marching band program. My first year I played trumpet, and the following years I switched to mellophone, the marching version of a French horn. Throughout the year I constantly rotated between instruments: French horn for concert band, trumpet for pep band, and mellophone for marching band. Music became part of my daily life without me even realizing it.
Then high school ended, and just like that, it was over.
All the hours I poured into something I genuinely loved suddenly stopped. Something that had once been part of nearly every day of my life now mostly sits untouched in my closet, only occasionally taken out every few years. It’s strange how quickly passions can become memories once structure disappears.
At the same time, my relationship with listening to music was growing even deeper. I think my true appreciation for music really developed during high school. When you’re living through those years, every emotion feels massive, like no one else could possibly understand it the way you do. Tumultuous friendships, young love, heartbreak, loneliness, uncertainty. Somehow music always seemed to understand those feelings before I could explain them myself.
Even now, certain songs instantly transport me back to specific moments in my life. Not every song, but some of them carry memories so vividly that hearing a few seconds is enough to bring everything rushing back.
As I moved through college, my appreciation for music continued to grow. There’s something difficult to explain about the way music works on people. The movement of rhythms, the layering of chords, the emotion hidden in lyrics. Sometimes I love a song simply because of how it sounds, the instruments, melodies, and atmosphere it creates. Other times it’s because the lyrics resonate with something personal inside me.
One thing I’ve always found interesting is looking back at what songs I listened to during certain periods of my life. Most of the time I can immediately tell what I was going through emotionally just by seeing the songs attached to that time. Music almost becomes a timestamp for memories.
More than anything, though, music has always been a source of comfort for me. It quiets things. It softens the stress and noise of everyday life for a little while. In some ways, it feels almost like a drug, something that temporarily lifts the weight off your chest. Especially during periods where I felt alone, or didn’t feel like I had people around me to fully understand my thoughts or emotions, music was still there.
It has been one of the few constants throughout my life, and honestly, I can’t imagine who I would be without it. The record had belonged to someone before me. I found it in a box at a market that smelled of rain and old paper. The sleeve was soft at the edges, the way things get when they've been held too many times. Inside, someone had written a date in pencil — just a date, nothing else — and I have spent years wondering what happened that day.
Music, I think, is the only art form that moves through time the way memory does. A painting stays still. A book waits for you to open it. But a song — a song happens to you. It arrives, it passes, and it leaves something behind that you can't quite name.
That winter album taught me this. Each morning, I would press play and the first few bars would land like snow on a window ledge — soft, expected, and still somehow surprising. By the third track, I had forgotten I was listening. The music had become the room itself.
"We don't choose the songs that matter. They choose the moments, and we just happen to be standing in the right silence."
I've tried to listen to it since, in other seasons. It doesn't work. It belongs to that winter the way a shell belongs to the shore where you found it. Take it home and it's just calcium and salt. Leave it where it was, and it holds the whole ocean.
I still have the record. The pencilled date is fading. Someday I'll play it again — probably on a morning that feels the same way, grey and close and strangely warm — and it will all come back. Not the facts, but the feeling. Which is, after all, the only kind of memory that matters.