The Phoenix Diaries: The Chapter Where I Opened an Old Folder and Ended Up in 2003
Buried on an old hard drive, 800 songs reminded me of who I was when the world still made sense.
Phoenix Diaries
Personal stories of transformation, heartbreak, and rebuilding from ground zero.
There's a different kind of grief that comes when you have to sort through paper.
It's not the kind of grief that makes for good poetry. Nor the type you can sob through and emerge from with puffy eyes and a clean slate.
I'm talking about taxes. Receipts. Expired insurance documents. Old bank statements.
The paper trail of a life you thought you were building forever.
I sat cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by boxes that I had moved from one home to the next over the years.
Boxes I've unpacked, repacked, and ignored. At this point, I think the boxes deserve squatters' rights.
Boxes that held not just files, but memories I didn't know I was avoiding.
Marriage documents. Joint purchases. Old handwritten lists in a familiar script that isn't mine.
And it wasn't only paper. I've been combing through my digital life, too.
The spreadsheets and archived emails were fine. Manageable.
It was the photos that undid me.
Scrolling through forgotten hard drives, I landed in a folder I hadn't opened in years.
There we were: smiling, sun-drenched.
Honeymoon shots where my optimism shone so brightly that it practically lit up the room.
Random selfies from Tuesday nights when I was in love and didn't know how temporary it all was.
And then…
Photos from years I didn't realize were hard until I saw my face in them.
Eyes tired. Smile stretched. Trying. Basically, the stock photo version of ‘I'm fine.’
Moments where I knew something was breaking, but I wasn't ready to admit it.
There is no timestamp for emotional decline. You don't notice the day it starts. You only see it years later, staring back from your own eyes.
I thought the photos broke me.
But then came the music.
Buried deep in an old drive, I found a folder marked: TANYA_CD_RIPS_FINAL.
Over 800 artists.
Music I had spent hours curating, ripping from my beloved CD collection, that massive bookcase I used to scan like a library. Alphabetized, obviously. I wasn't a savage.
Albums I listened to while driving with the windows down.
Songs I sang into my steering wheel, half prayer, half anthem.
Mixes I made for road trips, for heartbreak, for kitchen-dancing victories. Each one was labelled in Sharpie with the handwriting of a deranged teenager.
And as the file names scrolled past, it was like hearing them again: the crackle of a CD sliding into the stereo, the bass line that once made me believe I could survive anything, the chorus I knew by heart because it carried me through.
That's when it hit me.
We don't only lose people.
We lose the versions of ourselves that existed when that song was playing, when that photo was taken, when that world still made sense.
And the worst part?
I almost forgot she existed.
The woman who was fearless in love.
Who collected music like lifelines.
Who believed in forever and didn't yet know what betrayal sounded like.
And here I am, on the other side of forever, finding her again.
No big lesson. No neat bow.
Only this:
I looked at those photos. I scrolled through those songs. And I remembered I was happy once. Not perfect. But real.
And I know she's still here.
Beneath the files and grief.
She never left.
She just stopped playing the music.
Tell me…
If you opened your own forgotten music folder, what track would you find? Is there a song that still knows the old you by heart?
Anything REM for me can be a portal back to many different versions of me :-)