the sounds of grief and collecting vinyl

28-Jul-2025

While my heart has been broken before, this is my first time truly processing the end of a relationship. In the first month of our indefinite separation, I had no idea what to do with myself. We spent a decade and a half together; everything reminded me of them. The food I would eat for comfort? The cartoons and streams I would normally watch? Books I could reread? The plush toys I wanted to squeeze? Worst of everything was music - the very thing that got me through the initial separation, and every excruciating step of the nearly two years attempting reconciliation, became a major trigger for grief.

But music has been so important to me throughout my life as a way to process emotions and develop core memories. I can pinpoint specific moments in my life through sound. Motown streaming through the speakers at thrift stores with my mom as a kid. Crying to Bright Eyes while scribbling poetry in high school. Wistful Nick Drake albums on rainy days in undergrad. The bus doors opening once to reveal his face for the first time as Louie Armstrong’s voice poured into my ears. The thought of letting go of so much history because it might trigger sorrow and unwanted flashbacks made me all the more determined to find a way to reclaim it.

So I started with something light that would help me be present with my feelings rather than escape them, which led to me writing “reflections on emails i can’t send fwd”. Since then, I have been writing a lot about music that I have been listening to while grieving, but those essays have been hard to finish because they’re so personal.¹ Sometimes it makes me regret how much music I shared with him. We might be separated, but there are pieces of them everywhere in my life including in lyrics once sung in unison, in joy.

For my birthday, I finally bought myself a record player.² No matter how many audiophiles push CDs, the idea of selecting, cleaning, and spinning a vinyl disc felt so romantic, intimate, me. The set up came in several boxes that I had to breakdown and recycle. Then I had to rearrange my shelves and solid wooden dresser to have a suitable space to hook everything up. It shook me out of my bed rot, cleaning and caring for my space, trying to make a new home.

The first album that I spun was Those Wild Days by Patrick McHale and J.R. Kaufman, which I bought a few months before our separation. It’s nostalgic, haunting, gothic. I avoided listening to it for years because it brought on uncomfortable memories about a time in my life when I was I was dreaming about a future oblivious to the ways in which my life was about to explode. Now I’m able to find in its melancholy balance of love and loss a different resonance than my first impression, such as the final verse in “Farewell”: “And so it ends / With two aching hearts / Our melody / Incomplete.”

This morning, I listened to Nurture by Porter Robinson and my stomach dropped and chest tightened when “Blossom” started playing on the Side D: “Oh, it’s not alright, that one day we’re all out of time / I’ll write you another life, I’m sorry for crying / It’s just that I love you.” It was the most intense physical manifestation of grief I have felt in months. Despite that, I was struck by the realization that the other songs on both Nurture and Smile! :D did not make me think of the trauma I endured. Not even the concert we attended when I was still in the dark about how I had been betrayed and what would befall us in the coming weeks. I was present in the music. I was singing along to “Easier to Love You” and dancing to “Musician” and could feel every vibration passing through me saying “These albums are yours to love.”³

I can’t help that I’m haunted. Grief, for better or worse, is a companion within me whose hand I must hold through every warble, hiccup, and scream. But I would like to think that this grief is also singing along with me, if only quietly for now, under their breath, uncertain. My heart feels more open than it was before. I’m finally ready to listen to me. All the instincts I have been repressing. All the dreams that I told myself I could tuck away until later. So I’ll sing and dance as the records spin, building the soundtrack to a new chapter in my life.

#grief #music #personal