This article comes with a companion playlist, which can be listened to in any order. All songs on this list were coded into my Tumblr homepage.
I, like most girls my age, had a Tumblr. More than one actually — at one point I did indeed have a dedicated One Direction blog and I’m not ashamed to say it. Us fangirls were busy back then.
It’s difficult to remember how exactly my obsession with Tumblr developed, but eventually I was scheduling hourly posts to my blog for the days I’d be away from my laptop. And these weren’t any original posts — just reposts that fit my aesthetic. No photos of me, and rarely ones that I’d taken myself of something #clean or #grunge or whatever theme it was that I was going for at that time. My blog was entirely, completely, fully inconsequential, and my posting — or not — made no difference to anyone’s life but mine.
But it all meant something great to me. That was when the future felt as exciting and dangerous and vast as the internet itself. I can credit Tumblr with so many of my musical influences: Lana Del Rey, the 1975, Sky Ferreira, Marina and the Diamonds, The Strokes.
I started seeing the beauty in everything: the lights on the highway, shadows against pavement, my parents together in the front seats of the car. Sunsets, sunrises. Timing the right song to play at the right time as the bus drove me to pre-sunrise band practice and I saw the scattered lights of the businesses below streaming past like shooting stars and knew they were mine, and that I saw them even if no one else did. And they moved me. Every morning. Those minutes between school and my house, my little self shooting through the night imagining the endlessness of possibility and the rush that that feeling gave me.
Tumblr gave me something creative to focus on, a collage of feelings, stupid grainy photos of hands; of a bicycle leaned up against a French restaurant; the silhouette of Lana Del Rey against a neon light; a screengrab from Fight Club of the blimp that said THE WORLD IS YOURS; anyone and everyone and everywhere I was not.
I didn’t know how lovely I was back then. There was a whirlpool in my chest and I was diving into it searching for something. That me was fixated on predicting possible heartbreaks and channeling whatever I thought that might mean for my art. Maybe manifesting what I thought was beautiful back then, because I thought feeling pain might make more sense.
It’s been more than 10 years now since I graduated high school, which means the me I’m referring to here is even older than that. That me was a flightless bird, rushing to unravel every mystery of life and finding only myself in every reflection and on every street corner. You can go anywhere in the world and there you’ll be. What did I think I’d find?
Since then I’ve been avoiding these very songs because of what they hold, still no closer to discovering what any of the feelings they reveal mean.
When I started this blog I wished I had my Tumblr to go back on and reference, to copy the code and continue what I’d started all those years ago. But I’ve never been able to log in again, nor remember what my URL even would be. I’m sure by now it would be a broken page, or reclaimed by a new Tumblr user. But I’d like to imagine little me is still reblogging her aesthetic photos and checking her homepage to make sure the songs are playing right. In a purple room with posters on the wall. It gives me something to dream about. And for a minute it gets easier to pretend like all that time hasn’t really passed at all.
This might be the closest I get to writing a letter to my younger self. I hope she reads it.