I found a CD in my CD box labeled “Chiara’s Birthday Megamix 2004” when I was unpacking the other day. I’ve been packing and/or unpacking every day for the past two weeks and I’ve been finding the most surprising things. Anyway, I’d never seen or heard this CD before, the fact that it has my name written right on it notwithstanding. I popped it in on Friday and have been listening to it nonstop ever since.
It’s an excellent mix. It’s the perfect combination of songs I sort of know by people I’ve sort of heard of or read about, songs I have never heard but love anyway, and songs I’ve been wanting to listen to but didn’t know who sang them or what. Out of seventeen songs there is only one I occasionally skip. There’s even a bellydance-appropriate song on there. Whoever this person is who made me this most excellent mix, he or she is a) way cooler than me with really good taste in music and b) knows me enough to know what kind of music I would listen to if I had similarly good taste in music and c) a complete mystery since I don’t remember receiving this CD at my actual birthday. I’m not, in fact, entirely sure how it even got into the CD box at all as I’d never even seen it before, but I’m not complaining.
I played this CD while I was cleaning up the old place for the last time and saying goodbye to my poor Spike and Ziggy, who are no longer going to have anyone give them illegal milk and pet them on their heads the way they like. I played it while I hucked boxes and vacuum cleaners and hampers full of miscellany up and down stairs. I played it while I was building yet more furniture and while I was collecting bruises on pretty much every surface on my body, while I was cutting down cardboard boxes with a box cutter and while I was making restorative peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to get me through it all. I played it while I was doing errands (recycling my old laptop, going to Staples, buying a cranberry Jamba Juice and then spilling it all over myself in the parking lot, thereby necessitating the purchase of another cranberry Jamba Juice) and while I lay on the bed exhausted, staring up at the ceiling and thinking about all the other things I had to do this past weekend.
In a way I’m glad I didn’t know about this mix’s existence until now, that I didn’t listen to it on my actual birthday weekend. There was something simultaneously comforting and invigorating about having a whole new set of music to listen to while I tried to get through (another) tiring and difficult weekend without dissolving into a teary mess. I’m glad that I have some music in my collection, odd as it may sound, that’s associated completely with this in-between time, this weird shaky new way of doing things alone. I don’t have to sigh and look at the floor at any of the songs because they remind me of the past and of all the mistakes I’ve made or all the things I wish I’d done differently, or the ways I wish I’d been able to see things more clearly. They’re all mine and they have nothing to do with why I’ve been building furniture for the past two weeks. They are just right here and now, which is where I’m trying to live.
So thank you, mystery birthday CD mix maker. If you are reading this, I plan to take you to lunch if only you will fess up and send me the song list so I can know what’s on the soundtrack to my life’s most recent scenes.