playlist

I periodically lose my song playlists, which upsets me at the time because I spend some time putting them together based on various associations, and then they develop more associations as I listen to them. A few times now, they've disappeared from my iTunes and I'm left to start over (I've tried saving them but I don't do this often enough to encompass changes over time, so that the last ones I've saved are not the ones that were currently on my iPod when I lost them). A friend once told me that this might be good, to consciously change and renew, and I thought this was a good point. Sometimes, though, I remember the old and ache for it, like now--when I'm fully enmeshed in the third year of medical school which is also soon nearing an end, when I suddenly remember a song that was so definitively part of a playlist entitled "second year" and a handful of the songs on that list come back to me and though I can't remember all of them, I go back to the ones I do and remember so clearly the walks and study sessions and nothingness spent listening to those sounds, and more than that, how the feelings of the songs themselves get mixed up in how I felt back then, how those songs chose me and I chose them for that time and experience in my life, how suddenly the gap between then and now can simultaneously open up and close. It's a crazy, crazy thing.