Maybe we won’t change our passwords

There is a playlist on my phone. Really, it’s the only one I keep. The rest of my music rests jumbled and indiscriminate. I press shuffle with a prayer until my thumb cramps from skip, skip, skip, but there is one playlist, tucked away in a largely untouched app, that I cultivate with great care. Years of gentle tending: pruning and fertilizing. As years tick by, I catch myself forgetting about it more and more, frequently only remembering it when I find myself logged out of the app, on a new phone or foreign device. When I have to revisit old notes and texts and fish out that old friend’s email and accompanying, overused password. The one she surely still uses to post pictures I cruise past without comment and the one she uses to send emails to people and institutions I know nothing about. Precious little DNA strands to her life, tucked away, for a near stranger now, behind years of a shared life. Football games and swapped homework; gossip and weekend itineraries drafted like battle plans.

The girls in the texts are foreign to me now. Remnants of some life I was sure would never end. When we cried in bathroom stalls and smoked out of an apple and laid, wasted, under a starless sky. First kisses and last “omw” texts, preserved with the same reverence and dexterity of hieroglyphs and weathered diaries. Some capsule to our girlhood, still alive in our little playlist if you bothered to scroll up. Bits have been deleted, removed. An ex-boyfriend's song, a remix unapproved of by a favorite artist. And at odd, indeterminate moments, a song added. Some insight to the life of this girl I once knew, now alive in myth and bluetooth. Some song echoing through bedrooms I’ll never share and cars I’ll never ride in.

Occasionally, I find a song myself, available nowhere but our little app. Some bizarrely cut, poorly produced piece that knives into me and sticks, splintered and biting, until I waste hours finding it under some other account called something like “bubblegumbitchh34” or “whackerbaby666”. I’ll play it, curled up alone in my sheets or beside new friends in new cars, and for a moment I’ll wonder (sometimes in embarrassment, sometimes in longing) if that old friend of mine would catch me. Or if she would care. If she, too, would stop for a moment to listen and try to catch some piece of her old girl, truer than the false memories lost to youth or the gently cultivated photos lining the account she could hack into anytime she liked.

How well would she imagine the cars? The unfamiliar roads and the strangers beside me- sure, too, to turn to strangers one day themselves. For even if I keep them all our lives, we’ll leave behind the girls now in the car and the songs roaring through the radio, and we, too, will be left to the oldies station and the false promise of a rear view mirror. But maybe we’ll find the luck of an old album, a favorite song, a shared playlist, and the sudden taste of a charred pink lady twisted in lonely bed sheets. Some divine wink, the perfect old tune coming on at that ruin-your-day red light or just as the gas hits E. Some melody I hum from my bones, forgotten to the far recesses of useless space. And the brief, vibrant memory that brings me back to old girls, old cars. And the certainty I knew her. Singing along to new passengers, the certainty they now know her too.

And maybe we won’t change our passwords.