time capsules

on burying and revisiting

Maybe it’s because I grew up with mix CDs, which were permanent the moment they were burned, but when I finish making a playlist, I don’t add to or remove anything from it ever again. In this way, they function as portals. I can slide my scrollbar through time and be back in January 2020, single and trying to deal with it by adopting hobbies, like biking in the cold to the museums and painting other people’s words on canvas paper in my bedroom. The older I get, the less revisiting these playlists feels like nostalgia—it’s more like voyeurism. It is pure curiosity. Who was I when I made this, who was it that sang along to these songs?

*

During that time of being single and biking to the museums, I fell in love with a painting. The MoMA reopened after its remodel in October 2019, around the time I moved to Manhattan and started a new job and made a playlist called “fuckaround,” which felt complete at just eight songs ranging from ABBA to Led Zeppelin. I liked to bring my headphones and walk around the museum a little high and by myself, and on one of those afternoons, I turned a corner on the MoMA’s fifth floor and was confronted with Jackson Pollock’s One: Number 31—a giant, wall-sized canvas covered in multicolored lines and dribbles. It felt like a reflection of the noise in my brain, and I loved it immediately and so much that I bought a membership to the museum so I could visit the painting whenever I liked.

*

It’s not nostalgia, a word that finds its Greek origin in the pain of returning home, because it isn’t painful. It used to be, but one of the graces I’ve found in aging is that it hurts less to revisit the past. If anything, I’m more aware now of how precious a beautiful moment is and so I feel the pain in real time—pain that the moment will inevitably end, pain that nothing is a time capsule until it is sealed and buried.