Soundtrack of My Life by AZ Nowell

notes app by Valentine

i. i have notes app notes from high school they go way back at least five years songs and poems and apologies and fears—they go back at least five years

ii. i journal my dreams in my notes app i’ve had so many wedding dreams— will i get married one day? who’s to say? i won’t have any kids to tell the stories to. sometimes i think about the kid i used to be and how i used to believe in who i could be who i thought i’d be but now that kid is gone and i’m what’s left this shit goes back at least five years

iii. i used to write down my days in my notes app after therapy in high school and looking back, it all seemed so bleak i wonder if i would be proud of me if i saw my present self with the eyes of the past goddamn, do these feelings go back five years. iv. i would write down songs and poems in my notes app i still remember how to sing them

“So tell me now where has the time gone So tell me now where have you been Inside my head inside my heart inside the depths of my soul Or just not here at all”

i used to feel like i was alone and i wrote it in the songs and now some of the feelings are the same

that one goes back five years

iv. i wrote to you in my notes app all of you, one of you, everyone, and i remember every word

love letters, apologies, greetings

i wrote them down in my notes app before i sent them out to you

v. i wrote to me in my notes app and i remember every word i hope i remember me five years from now

The Collector

I’ve always had a sweet tooth, always had a soft spot for the things that make life sweet and soft and sunshiney. I’m prone to collecting, quick to pick up the things that catch my eye. I’m also prone to losing things, but thankfully not prone to forgetting. Finding things to lose is a way of memorializing my life. There is very little I cherish more than the things that I once had. I once had a sky blue picnic table. I can picture three little heads, three different colors of curls, all pushed together over a pile of flowers, lovingly picked with small pink painted fingers. I don’t remember where I learned about honeysuckle. I do remember telling my little sisters about it, the awe that must have been in my eyes at the promise of the sweetness of the flowers. Mama pointed out a patch of them behind our house that summer. We were always barefoot back then, and she set us loose to turn our toes green in the grass in our search for the little yellow buds. We counted them out, feeling that nothing was more important than fairness, and yet I still pushed a few of the flowers from my pile into each of theirs. I remember sitting around the little blue picnic table, and the fragile softness of the flower petals against the rough color of the plastic. I can hear the triumphant laughs we let out as the sweetness hit our tongue. We conquered a lot together then, and the discovery of sweet things to make our own was among our favorites, the flowers as satisfying as the expired Halloween candy smuggled from the cupboards behind mama’s back, tucked away into our hiding places to be pulled out on nights we stayed up giggling under the covers. I don’t remember how long we sat at that table, if we let the sun set on us waiting for mama to call us back into the house. A part of us may still be there, three different colored heads of curls bent over the small patch of wildflowers. I hope someone can still hear the bells of our laughter, the rising tones of good natured bickering. I hope a bit of the sunshine from our smiles still coaxes that flower patch back each spring.

I once had a story. The first one I remember telling. I can see the way it wrapped around the blank page of computer paper stolen from Daddy’s pile of stuff on the desk in the living room, and the illustration I painstakingly drew across the top half of the page in bursts of yellow and orange crayon.

I don’t remember exactly what I said, but I can imagine the pride with which I handed it off to my parents. I can picture the way I stared at them as they read, waiting for them to proclaim me a genius and run to attach it to the front of the fridge.

I know my grandma later kept it in one of the dusty storage boxes under her bed, beside straight A’s on report cards and newspaper clippings of people she thought I would one day want to learn about. I can see my parent’s handing it to her with the same pride I had before, can see them seeing the person I would become, full of stories and searching for the right words to tell them. I like to think they watch me now, and think back to those sentences. I think a bit of that story seeps into every single one that I write now. I hope that one day, when that aged piece of paper dissolves into the earth, it feeds the same trees that will one day look over my shoulder as I write my last words.

I once had a bracelet. Pink and blue string braided together and tied carefully around the summer darkened brown of my wrist. It was fuzzier than it had once been, changed at some point in the endless days of washing hands in art room sinks and playgrounds wear and tear. I don’t remember when it fell off, or the day she first gave it to me, but I remember all the days in between. I remember notes passed in a secret language, the pride we took in writing them, and the conspiratorial glances sent across tables when they were intercepted and then discarded in confusion. I remember glitter dumped on my bedroom floor in the rare midnight hour we saw on one of the various birthday sleepovers we begged our parents for. I remember the way we used to collect odds and ends for each other when we parted ways at the end of the day.

The dirty but magical looking rock I found at the playground near my house, wrapped up in a tissue and presented with pride, and the dingy beaded necklace found in the basement of her church traded the next day at recess. I treasured those prizes we traded more than anything else. I kept that friendship bracelet for years, even after it broke.

It lay in it’s spot at the bottom of my jewelry box, among the cheap pieces collected at the mall, and the soft glow of the pieces passed down from family more and more as I got older. Even now we keep each other the way I kept that bracelet. Tucked safely away, but always there when we need it. I hope she keeps me tucked away with that same kind of safety, and more than this I hope she’s not afraid to pull me out and polish the glow we’ve kept alive after so many years. I once had a bookshelf. The kind of bookshelf meant for children’s spaces, meant to fold in and out, meant to hold little more than picture books and dictionaries. I sat it in my room, and banned my baby sisters from putting things on it, and prided myself on the collection I was building. I remember the first chapter books put on it, passed down from Mama’s collection where it was tucked away at grandma’s house. I went on so many trips to bookstores, with friends wandering the aisles behind me. I remember the ones that were just as excited as I was, the ones that waved me down to excitedly whisper about a cover they loved. I grew a special sort of passion in the gaps of those shelves. My love for words came blossoming out of the deckled pages of an aging classic. My love for slow meandering plots came bursting from the spine of the quiet fantasy books lining the top shelves. I hope I never lose the love that bookshelf helped me foster, the excitement that grew to life between the covers I meticulously curated. I hope my words get to grace another young person’s shelves one day, and build that same sort of passion into them.