Thank you, Jonathan

We've never actually met. I had been thinking about doing this on a special date, when the IRP turned 10 or when the October 2008 playlist (the first one I heard) would, but I wanna write it now. I wanna thank you for all these years, for all these playlists. I wanna thank you because you've crafted a large part of the Soundtrack of my life.

The first time I heard the Indie Rock Playlist I was in med-school. My best friend had downloaded it, and we were hanging out at the faculty; he left for the restroom, I think, and I listened to the songs while scribbling something that turned out to be a poem inspired both by the playlist and my recent trip to Germany. It was new music, music I hadn't heard, music I needed to anchor all these things that had happened.

It frightened me at first. What if I didn't like the new songs? What if I didn't find any song to relate to what I was feeling? At first I was apprehensive, and I kept on being it for a while. But the new music had an allure that kept me coming, outsmarting my fears.

I kept on living, you went away for a while. I went to Germany again and songs from playlists you had recommended gave my trip a different gravitas. While walking down the cobbled streets with my walkman (yes, I had a pink walkman) I knew that years later when I'd hear them again those streets would be in my memories. The epic and the whisper were both there. I realized that I wanted to  record the songs I had heard that year, the songs that sung to me about my life.

Along came another year, and then another. On 2011 I realized that my list of 35 or 37 songs was way too small for the whole year, so I started doing it by quarters. You were there all the time, on my (yet again pink) iPod, in my ears. The playlists gave texture to my bus rides, to the heavy work hours in the hospital, to the nights after my shifts. The songs filled a space nobody else could; they gave me a feeling neither words nor pictures could give.

I went away one more time. I lived alone while the July 2011 playlist stood witness to my late-night cooking, my Harrison reading, my silent longing for a guy that had left me back home. It was that very same playlist that sounded in my ears when I sillily rejoiced him writing again.

But then the year ended, the guy ended, and the work at the hospital got harder. I stopped listening, 

stopped downloading, saying I didn't have time. It wasn't true; it was that the fear was winning again. I was afraid I was never going to be as happy as I had been; I feared I would never fall in love, or even worse, I would never again be fallen in love with. I parted with time and hid myself within the folds of the past.

Two years went by, and I won't say nothing happened, because a lot did, but sometimes it felt as if I was only feeding myself with memories, like chewing a gum that had already lost its flavor. It was the cellos on Aventine by Agnes Obel on the October 2013 playlist that brought me back. I was hearing them on July 2014, but it is never late to remind yourself who you are.

Exhuberance followed; it was as if the playlists had never lost hope of me coming back, like a prodigal son. I know that it's not about me, I'm not that egocentric, but you know how it feels like a song or a book is particularly talking to you? That's how I felt with the June 2014 playlist. Hope was being born again.

I admit I haven't listened to every playlist; I hereby confess I don't like every song. Many songs on my Soundtracks don't come out of your playlists (I think that would be even creepier than me writing this right now). Yet just the fact of knowing a new playlist is gonna come out keeps me on hoping. Yes, time has passed; yes, I might not be as happy. But hell, I might even be happier than I have ever been, who knows?

Your playlists have become the anchor upon which I can remember my life; they have come to represent a transcendence I could have not foreseen that October afternoon almost seven years ago. I want to thank you for this. I want to thank you for unknowingly helping me to let go of the past and not be afraid of the future. Thank you, Jonathan, for keeping up with these playlists.

Thank you very very much for helping me build the Soundtrack of my life.