Life in Every Word

… and I want life in every word to the extent that it’s absurd.

Every time I hear those first few little techno beats of “The District Sleeps Alone Tonight,” I feel utter, total, complete happiness. It doesn’t matter where I am or what I’m doing, I just stop in my tracks. And remember.

You know how certain smells, certain sounds, certain photographs can automatically transport you to a different time and place? For me, the ultimate nostalgic experience is playing the Postal Service’s “Give Up” album. It is an incredibly beautiful, melancholy, genius, timeless, introspective, wonderful work of art in its own right, but because it became the soundtrack to a specific time in my life, it has really special meaning. It was a time of growing up and self-discovery and falling in and out and back in love and tasting freedom, and all the while, Ben Gibbard and Jenny Lewis’s voices were harmonizing in my head.

The year was 2004. I had just moved into my dorm room at the College of Charleston and was getting to know my roommates, Grace and Rachel. It was the first time I had lived away from home. Outside of Tennessee. Not knowing a single soul. On a crazy, terrifying, exhilarating adventure. This was my chance to spread my wings and stretch my legs. My chance to be anyone. My chance to change the things I didn’t like about my high school self, my sheltered self, my dorky self. Because who here would know the difference anyway?

In that Berry dorm room, Rachel opened our eyes to a whole new world of music and film unlike anything I had heard or seen. One night we huddled on our beds and passed around our CD collections, burning each other’s music, and I’ll never forget hearing “Such Great Heights” for the first time. From then on, I was hooked. It became a permanent fixture in my second-generation iPod (I can still picture exactly how the songs looked on the screen as they played… this was before all the fancy color screens and everything else.) I would play it as I walked to classes on that beautiful Charleston campus, imagining myself to be the star of a Zach Braff film, ignoring the fact that I do not have the looks or talent of Natalie Portman. We would play it in the room when we were studying or plastering our walls with cutouts from magazines and other random materials (tissue paper, anyone?). I remember singing “Nothing Better” in the stairwells and having other girls go, “That song is amazing!” It was like an unspoken solidarity that year, when it seemed that everyone on campus had discovered this secret treasure and we were all giddy with excitement over it. I guess that’s just how the college music scene works in general. :)

But to this day, when I hear that album, and as I listen to it now while writing this, so many memories and feelings swirl inside me. Like jumping in the fountain at midnight with Rachel and Grace. Like driving to the beach with people from Seacoast and spontaneously going swimming in our clothes. Like making new friends and going on road trips to North Carolina and to Florida and to Myrtle Beach for shows. Like holing up in the library, pretending to study but really spending too much time on Myspace (this was wayyy back when Facebook was still just for college kids and had literally JUST been introduced to the world… it wasn’t quite as cool then. :) ) Like going on a beach trip with my astronomy class and having our professor and his wife make us vegan spaghetti and show us the wonders of the world through his crazy telescopes. Like giggling and talking literally all night with my Rachel and Grace about all the boys we had crushes on (for Rachel it was always Tim Kasher and Conor Oberst… I can still distinctly hear her declaring her undying love for them in her perfect Southern drawl). Like going to my first parties and seeing Mae and Honestly at the Music Farm and never going to bed before 3 am and cramming for tests and waiting in line for hours to meet Paul Frank. Like first love, first heartbreak, and then finding the love of my life when I least expected it. Like coming back to Knoxville and working at Starbucks and making more new friends and going to see the Breakfast Club and sitting out on the Starbucks patio or going to Steak ‘n Shake after closing. Like watching lightning storms while sitting on the dock of a lake and being taught how to fly fish and spending too much money and skipping classes in the spring time because it was just too pretty to be indoors. Like driving along Neyland Drive during fall and feeling absolute peace and joy about my life and about the day ahead of me. Like waking up at 5 am to write a paper that was due that day. Like getting engaged and planning a wedding and going on family vacations and yeah… still spending too much money. :)

When Jamie and I had our first kiss as husband and wife with “Such Great Heights” playing in the background (“in a style Clark Gable would have admired- I thought it classic”), it just felt perfect. Like the perfect ending to an era, the perfect way to say goodbye to one chapter of our lives. A chapter of growing up and making mistakes and learning how to love. But it was also the beginning. The beginning of our life together, as adults (although I still rarely feel like one!), as people making a commitment to start new adventures and create new memories and traditions. The beginning of a time when we could now look back at those formative years with fond memories, and with a soundtrack.

So thank you, Postal Service. Thank you for giving me such a tangible way to treasure some of the best years of my life to date. And who knows? Maybe one day you’ll create that much-talked-about follow-up album and we can christen it our new soundtrack. Here’s to hoping!