a playlist that captivates my feelings of taking my car, saying fuck it, and moving to Massachusetts.
I’ve been in Florida for as long as I could remember, growing up there wasn’t bad but it necessarily wasn’t a place I wanted to spend the rest of my life in. Therefore, since hitting the early stages of high school, my focus was always on finding a way to get out of there. It can be hard for some, I would even go to the extent to say that it feels like a black hole, endlessly pulling back everything in its path. Florida was my black hole. As hard as I tried to do whatever possible to get out, there was always something pulling me back. Being a non-green cardholder wasn’t making matters easy either, and being unable to receive FAFSA funds really hindered my ability to take out-of-state schools into consideration.
After hunkering down the year at a local state university, I was greeted with the incredible offer to do a year at another state. I jumped at this opportunity, and within the month I was ready to pack all my belongings, start my car and drive off. My family was against this and my friends were saddened to see me go, but this was something I’ve always wanted to do and nothing would stop me. I took one of my dearest friends with me and drove through the entire east coast to get to the place where I would start my new beginnings, Massachusetts.
Massachusetts was always in the equation for me, a beautiful place and highly educational. Although my dreams were to kick it in Boston, I was grateful even if I was now residing in Amherst and stuck in suburbia. My trip there, however, was one of the highlights of my life, and this playlist focuses on the vastly different feelings I experienced throughout that trip.
Step out by Jose Gonzalez is literally the feeling I had when I realized I was free.
Chicago was my anthem, except to replace that with Boston, as that was where I was headed to drop off my road trip buddy, a spirited song following Sufjan and his trip to a newfound place fit perfectly as my theme.
Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains) was the highlight of the trip and the song has this beautiful meaning of being able to escape the suburbs, this was something I felt when I arrived and the song does that feeling justice.
Salt, although a song about a relationship sustained by drug use, in my story, is how I felt after I dropped my friend off and I was driving to where I would be spending the next year by myself, a feeling that I was by myself now.
Drivin’ on 9 is a song that I felt when I was, get this, driving on Route 9, the highway to take me to my destination.
The Strangers is an ode to strange faces I’ve met and how some paint the black hole blacker.
Pulaski at Night was my reaction to finding myself in this new city, full of beauty and opportunity.
The rest tend to have to apply to vastly different feelings I had while in this new place. With some songs like I Want a House representing the time I got a house with my best friend here and Sensitivity the song that we bonded over which I can attribute my friendship to. So Free identifying with the outlook I currently have on my future and now, sadly, Head Home representing the feeling that I am losing all the progress I made to get here, seeing that I now have to move back home because of COVID-19. Greyhound touches upon the realization I’ve been having of, “Wow, all this, just to come back home? What the fuck.”
I am eternally grateful and thankful for my experiences and even more so considering how amazingly bittersweet this whole trip has been. But, I’m gonna be cliche as fuck and say, “tHiS iSn’T a GoOd bYe, iT’s a SeE yOu lAtEr.”
