The Heartbreak Playlist

When the printed slide sheets are more ink and highlighter than they are paper, when the heat from the desk lamp begins to warm the desk, and when the apartment I share with my best friend is empty, it becomes the perfect time to fall into the tower of pillows atop my hastily made bed to listen to the playlist that Matthew gave me before he fucked off to the other side of the damn country. New York, where his parents graduated from and expected him to go for college, or whatever else uppity-yuppy bullshit his parents wanted from him. The moments between school, work, and kicking out random one-night stands are usually when I begin listening to the playlist. There is a moment of tense anticipation that occurs in between me plugging my earphones into my phone and me starting the actual playlist but it’s anything but quiet. In that space devoid of any meaningful sound, I hear the last words he said to me in person — listen to this when you miss me, but try to find someone else. That single sentence, thirteen words, fifteen syllables, were the last things he said to me before he disappeared into the departure gate, leaving me behind with teary eyes and a message on my phone containing a playlist.

Each song represents a momentous event in our short two year relationship, and as corny as it seems, I’ve been hanging onto these songs like my life depends on it. Colton told me that the first six months after a break up are usually considered to be the hardest, but it’s been three years since Matthew went across the country and it still feels like I’m stuck in that cycle of post-breakup grief everyone talks about. It’s gotten to the point that I’ve memorized each of the songs so each time I’ve replayed them, I’ve relived the moments and memories they’re tied to. It’s almost as if Matthew died, but he’s still around. Though after the first year, he stopped responding to my messages.

The first song is the song that played when we first met. It was the late summer of 2011, someone was blaring the song through a speaker in the cafeteria where he and I got involved in a fight that neither one of us had business being a part of. In our high school, there were some couples that were considered to be “power couples” and one of them happened to be each of our best friends. On that hot late summer afternoon, the school was treated to a spectacle when Colton and Emilia had a very public fight in the middle of the cafeteria. He was there to back Emilia up, and I was there to back Colton up. Something about what Colton’s mother said about Emilia and some other unclear point of contention led to the confrontation. In the middle of it all, Emilia threw an apple which was meant for Colton’s head but instead hit me square on the nose. They were blinded by the argument that they didn’t notice that the apple was a tad bit more red since blood splattered on it, but Matthew noticed right away so he helped me up to go to the nurse’s office. We introduced ourselves awkwardly in the nurse’s waiting room. From that moment on he started making more of an appearance in my life. Something that I thought was just a coincidence, but apparently was so much more.

“So, you’re Saul right?” Matthew blurted.

“I go by Soleil, only the teachers call me Saul.” I mumbled beneath the wad of napkins the nurse instructed me to hold up to my nose while pinching the bridge of my nose with my other hand.

“Oh, sorry. The name’s Matthew.” He grinned and offered me a hand.

I narrowed my eyes at his hand, then looked quizzically at him, “I would shake your hand, but if I do that there’s gonna be blood all over your hand and my shirt, so how about,” I jutted my elbow towards him, “Elbow shake?”

He chuckled. “Elbow shake it is.”

The second and third songs were the pop songs that the marching band played in the halftime shows that year. Every time we came back from the field, Matthew would be there with some water. The first football game of the season happened that same Friday on the week that the fight happened. I had noticed him in the previous years giving water to Emilia and some other people in the drumline but I never paid attention to him. But that first game where approached me with a water bottle took me by surprise. Hell, it even took Emilia by surprise. I could see Emilia giving me a death glare in my periphery and I did the best I could to ignore the radiating hatred from her general direction so that I could give Matthew proper gratitude. Though, I would be lying to say that I thought he was just doing it to be nice the first time, but I was proven wrong when he did it for a second time, and then a third time. And in between those football games, he seemed to always make an effort to catch up to me during passing period or during lunch, much to Emilia’s chagrin.

She and Colton had broken up that day of the fight, I think that the Matthew broke some sort of unspoken rule about being nice to someone who had a connection to a friend’s ex. He started inviting me out to go to some Mexican eatery that was open 24/7 off of the interstate, something that he, Emilia and their friend group did as a post-game ritual. The first time was as awkward as it could be, especially because Emilia stared me down for a majority of it, but Matthew seemed to be able to keep the conversation going. So it just became a thing that I would join them for after-game burritos. Slowly, it became less awkward over time.

The fourth song was the song that took me by surprise when Matthew asked me to homecoming. The two weeks leading up to the homecoming game and the homecoming dance was one filled with weird whispers and out of place giggles. If Colton and I were walking down a hallway or entering the band room, I would notice that some people would excitedly whisper and then proceed to look over at our direction. I assumed that it was because Colton was planning on either asking Emilia back out again or someone else entirely new. The homecoming game came and went, afterwards people in the band room were talking about who they were going to be going with to the dance the next day, and as soon as I finished changing back into my normal clothes, Colton put his hands over my eyes and started leading me out of the band room.

I shoved my hands outwards to reach for something to hold, but Colton was practically controlling my balance from my head down. “Uh, Colt? I feel like this counts as a hostage situation, or like a kidnapping at the very least.”

“Just trust me Soleil, you’re gonna wanna see this.” He whispers excitedly.

Light started breaking through the cracks between Colton’s hands, which tipped me off to the fact that he had led me to the quad area of the campus. It was there that the song started playing, and where Colton removed his hands from my face revealing Matthew’s homecoming proposal. Emilia was there helping him hold up a huge poster with the words: Homecoming? Sorry if this hit you like an apple to the nose. Matthew had convinced Emilia and Colton to come together at least for a night to help him out with the homecoming proposal, and that would be the last time that they would be in good terms with each other. The fifth song was the song he and I slow-danced to during the homecoming dance.

The sixth song was the song playing through my bedroom stereo when he finally asked me to be his girlfriend during Thanksgiving Break. It took a bit of time to get my pronouns correct. But in the end he got used to it. When he showed up to my house out of the blue with flowers, I thought he would ask me to be his boyfriend, but it was a pleasant surprise when I heard, “So, uh, I was thinking — or, uh, if you could be my — okay, sorry let me start over. Do you want to be my girlfriend?” He was truly my first real relationship. It was on that first-love level, that sort of love that you stay up all night thinking about during the duration of the relationship, and for me, that type of love that I continue to stay up all night thinking about in the lonely hours of a fading night time. Colton was shocked when he heard the news and raved about how happy he was that I finally found someone to be in a relationship with. Matthew told me that Emilia chided the relationship, stating that, “At least something good came out from my disaster of a relationship with Colton.”

The seventh song was the song that we listened to the first time we shared an intimate moment. On our one year anniversary, he and I went to this park somewhere in the town a few miles north from our city. That town is the epitome of privileged suburbia, there’s a small park nestled in it’s hills that people usually go to so that they can look at the city skyline at night. It was unusually quiet that night, usually there would be groups of other teenagers or adults trying to relive their youth, but no one else was there. It was like the universe was reserving that time and space purely for me and Matthew. He specifically put this song out of chronological order because the number seven is considered to be lucky, and as he puts it, he got “lucky that night”.

The eighth and ninth songs played over Colton’s speakers at the party where Matthew and I had our first fight. We were on our tenth month of the relationship, and I was so sure that after the dust from the fight settled, he would leave — that he would see that things were too difficult and he would just throw everything away, but he didn’t. They were songs that I was surprised to see on the playlist, but it reminded me that beneath it all, he and I were human. We were fallible, not devoid of insecurity, and ultimately beautiful in that imperfect form.

The tenth song was the one that we listened to when we snuck out of our hotel room during the Senior Winter Trip where we went stargazing on the roof of the hotel. Lake Tahoe was a more than a couple of hours away from our city, and the type of place where people can stargaze for days because of the lack of light pollution. Matthew talked the person sharing the room with me into switching places. When we were sure that no one else was awake or when the chaperones were either drunk or asleep, we snuck up to the roof. The glistening stars hung up in the never ending velvet universe made the views from that park in that privileged suburbia seem so artificial.

The eleventh song played over the coffee shop speakers the time he told me that he was planning to go across the country for college. It was two weeks before we graduated, and we went to a coffee place after school just as we often did, but once we got settled and our drinks arrived, he slid over his acceptance letter with a bright gold inlay insignia on the top of the letter.

“What’s this?” I asked him, pushing aside my iced coffee before picking it up.

He sighed, “My parents went to that private university, and they always planned that I would attend it as well.”

“Oh, so you aren’t going to the State University in this city with me?” I furrowed my brows as I continued to read the increasingly annoying words that were so intricately printed on the heavy weight paper. The letter was probably meant to be framed. I interrupted him before he could say another word, “This says New York, are you going to New York?”

“Yeah.”

“So what about us?”

“That’s what we need to talk about.”

So that’s where our relationship ended. In that conglomerate coffee place a few blocks away from our High School. A part of me wishes that it ended in a more poetic or dramatic place, at least then it would be a story worth sharing with people. A story that begins with a breakup in a dramatic place like a cliff or a rooftop sounds better than a breakup that takes place in a coffee shop that looks like seventy others in the area. I was composed up until I finished the iced coffee. At that point, I placed a five dollar bill on the table, stood up, and left the coffee shop.

Matthew ran after me and grabbed my arm, “Hey, babe, where are you going?”

“We broke up, don’t call me babe. I’m going to take a bus home.” I deadpanned, struggling to keep the tears at bay.

“That’s not the point!” He shouted, if I think back to it, that may have been the first time he shouted at me.

“Then what is it?” I turned around, indignant.

Matthew pursed his lips, and took a deep breath. He moved his hand down my arm and intertwined his fingers with mine, all the while not breaking eye contact with my whitening knuckles. “I need to know that you’ll be okay.”

I didn’t respond. Not verbally, anyway. I placed a kiss on his lips, smiled an artificial smile, and turned my heel away from him. Walking briskly towards the bus stop at the end of the parking lot. He didn’t follow me though I kept wishing he would. We didn’t talk until he showed up to my house two afternoons after that. We didn’t tell Colton or Emilia, because we decided that it’d be better for them to draw their own conclusions, and if not, we would tell them when Matthew is all the way across the country. We also decided that it’d be better for us to remain friends, because he couldn’t see me as an enemy and I felt the same way. That afternoon felt out of place, like it existed slightly behind on the entirety of linear chronology. My mom insisted that Matthew stayed over for dinner, and we had dinner just as we’ve done so many times in the previous two years, he even stayed to watch an episode of my mom’s favorite medical drama. Afterwards he and I spent one last night together on the part of the roof just outside of my bedroom window. Of the things we talked about that night, the thing I remember the most was our conversation about songs.

“What song do you think of when you think of me?” He asked suddenly, ending our previous conversation topic, “Because I think about this one specific song when I think of you, and it’s like embedded into my neurons.” He took his phone out and started playing an indie alt-rock song that begins with some muted wobbles and then transitions into a spoken-word-esque intro before getting into a full on synth instrumental chorus. It was a song that talked about falling in love with someone, and about being in someone’s arms.

After we finished listening to his song for me, I fell silent as I pieced together the thoughts necessary for me to come up with a song for him. I took my phone out as well, couldn’t stop the grin that came to my lips when I started playing the song for him. His face lit up when he recognized the song with it’s signature beginning guitar riffs, and he started tapping his toes when the first violin part sounded off.

The twelfth song is the song he designated for me. A song that we have listened to plenty of times in his car, and a song that we often listened to when we found ourselves in each other’s arms. Listening to the song is like a reminder that there used to be a person that thought of me in a way that the song is like message only for me.

The thirteenth song is the song I designated for him. His dark brown hair that was always somehow resting in a coif, a half-lipped confident smirk that matched his general attitude towards things. The way he carried himself around strangers as if he had known them all of his life. The way that he would make my knees buckle every time he would say my name, and the subsequent shine that appeared in his ambered eyes when I turned to him. Everything about him found itself wrapped in each stanza of the song.

The fourteenth song and fifteenth song are the songs which he said would help me in the nights when I felt that I needed someone to hold me, and the songs that he said he would listen to when he missed me the most. When Colton, Emilia and I, along with his parents were saying our goodbyes to him at the airport, there was a pessimistic nagging voice in the back of my head reminding me that I might not need to suffer through the heartbreak for too long, because everyone was hyping up the supposed end of the world in December, as predicted by the Mayans — but it never came, and I have had to endure 3 years of constant hurt ever since, with the last two years being especially rough because Matthew stopped regularly answering my texts.

I know that High School romance stories have this magnetic quality to them that makes people gravitate towards them, and I also know that high school romances don’t last that long in the first place. Perhaps I thought that he and I were the exception to that rule, and once again I think that I have to re-evaluate reality.

He called it the Don’t Miss Me Too Much Playlist, but I call it The Heartbreak Playlist.