Lonerz: A Playlist

“I Ran (So Far Away),” A Flock of Seagulls

I used to run to this song. I was fifteen with lush blond hair and newly sprung boobs and found it hilarious to hit the pavement at the same tempo as its iconic chorus. I’d run through the neighborhood where I’d grown up, hoping someone I knew from school would drive by and witness my new adult body—the bass-playing heartbreaker who’d sometimes surprise me with a strong hug and kiss on the cheek in front of his friends, who once drove past me as I ran up the biggest hill in town only to slam the brakes, jump out of his best friend’s shitty white Pontiac, and tackle me to the ground with a bear hug. I ran all over town back then, as if looking for someone else to stop and hug me like they meant it.

These days I walk. I’m twenty-three, four years older than I was when my doctor first diagnosed me with psoriatic arthritis, an autoimmune disease in which my body destroys itself, starting with the bones in my feet. My physical activity is limited to swimming, yoga, and a brief stroll every few days. On this chilly October afternoon, I walk to explore Columbus, my new city, and to drop miscellaneous bills and letters into a nearby USPS box. Since I left Texas two months ago, the postal service is my only physical tether—an outstretched hand—to everyone I know. With headphones tucked in my ears, I listen to A Flock instead of the clamoring city streets.

I become more like my mother every day—a woman who, until the day she died, knew a song for everything. In fact, what she lacked in her ability to console, she made up for in her ability to point me toward the perfect song for any situation. In high school, when I had a crush on a boy, she made me listen to Bonnie Raitt. Months later, when that boy told me he loved me, I made her listen to Bruno Mars, telling her that the song was how he claimed to feel about me. “He must really love you,” she said.

That was how we spoke. We didn’t vent about life over Saturday-morning brunch and lattes. We told each other our deepest feelings through songs I can’t listen to anymore.

I’ve never ventured anywhere without music. In 2000, I began to ride the tech wave from portable CD players to my first MP3; I eventually saved up for a blue iPod Nano and then an iPod Touch. Twenty years later, every passing car and throbbing subwoofer reminds me that music is everywhere, stored and streamed from an invisible cloud, wherever we want it to be. I no longer have to wait for my brother to get off the family computer to download my music, nor do I have to squabble with my father about his Santana records that accidentally end up on my device. Instead of an electric-veined process, music has become a fog through which I walk. It is all around, waiting to be sunken into.

While I scuffle along the cracked sidewalks of a strange city, I am accompanied only by a mix of songs I once prepared for my solo adventures—flights, road trips, aimless excursions, long walks I began to take just after Mom died. If she were here now, I’d share the list with her. Maybe we’d swap songs. Maybe she had a list of songs to fill her own quiet nights. On this autumn afternoon, solitude is not new to me. My dead mother and our songs, all of them, have prepared me for this.

“The Music of the Night,” The Phantom of the Opera

I have never seen a live production of the wildly famous Phantom of the Opera, just the mediocre 2004 film and the twenty-fifth-anniversary recorded production from London—which I’ve seen twice. First, as a hungry fourteen-year-old, hiding in my room and sucking romance from best-selling werewolves and vampires, then again when I moved in with my dad a few months before leaving Texas, when my stepmom confessed that Phantom was the first show she’d ever seen on Broadway and, therefore, her favorite. With nothing better to do as the country crumbled into uncertainty, the three of us gathered on the couch to watch Phantom when YouTube streamed it for free—a show about a face-masked man in solitude, mind you—at the beginning of COVID-19 in America.

Even after this second watch, nothing made sense about Phantom. Not one of the musical fans I knew—not even my stepmom—could answer my questions. Was I to believe that the Phantom was truly a ghost or just a ghastly human man? A beast beneath a stage with half a face, stalking a dainty soprano for her enchanting yet harrowing E6 note? How does anyone comprehend, on just a single stage, the scenic progression within a complex, multilevel opera house? But I suppose the story itself doesn’t bring people to the theater. No one cares to answer my logistical questions because Phantom’s music is so simultaneously chilling and cinnamon-warm—perhaps even glamorous in its synthesized bloodbath of a titular song—that no one gives a damn who’s real and who’s not.

That night in 2020 I stayed up late, unable to sleep because I couldn’t understand what could compel the show’s main character to kidnap and trap a girl in what appeared to be a haunted cave. So I fell into an obsessive bout of research. Long after midnight, I learned (in addition to the life span of sea turtles and the likelihood of apocalypse by asteroid) that the Phantom’s story originated as a novel—it was more than a lover’s serenade or a Broadway smash. Before I fell asleep that night, I’d bought Gaston Leroux’s 1909 novel, Le fantôme de l’opéra, and read the first five chapters.

“Joshua,” Dolly Parton

To appease my grandma Judy, I once visited the single-bedroom apartment of her distant older brother, my long-lost great-uncle Gerald—known as “Bubba” to my family— who had stopped coming around in the ’90s after the death of his and Judy’s mother, Verna. After the funeral, he moved an hour north to live on his own. Other than my grandma, whom we call Ma T, no one had seen him since—and even she’d seen him only once.

His apartment hadn’t been renovated since the ’70s. Linoleum floor peeled away from its corners. A spilled carton of oatmeal covered the kitchen as if it were a hamster cage. He owned no furniture, only a weight-lifting machine and an enormous desk, above which one hundred sticky notes clung like feathers against the wallpaper.

What little I know about Bubba comes from the few relatives who knew him before he left. He lived frugally and independently. No car, no TV, no spouse or children. To them, he was strange, abnormal in his reclusiveness, and often the punch line to family jokes. I’ve often pitied him, knowing my family’s tendency to assign unspoken labels to nearly everyone. As kids, we were each stamped with a persona we’ll never outgrow. One of my cousins is The Musician, another The Lawyer, my brother The Honest Gentleman. I scratched and kicked my way out of The Quiet One only to become The Bizarre Hippie Who Doesn’t Give a Fuck.

Bubba was always known as The Odd One. No one understood the fragments of information we learned about his life on the rare occasion he called my grandma. Ma T would tell us of his scratchy voice, worried that her brother would eventually lose his ability to speak without any people to talk to. But he seemed to prefer a life on his own. I’ve tried to maintain an open mind about him. Like the rest of my family, I’ve spent twenty-three years wondering why he lived like he did, but secretly I admire his insistence on separation—his unwillingness to be manipulated by family. If he’d stuck around, would he and I be anything alike, the only ones in the family to never bring home a date?

The tokens I have of Bubba are stunning portraits he took of my mother when she was young. One of the black-and-white photos captures her as a kid, afraid, holding her hands over her ears, clutching a rock in one to deaden the sound around her. No one remembers what frightened her in that moment, but it could’ve been anything—my grandparents say my mother “was ’fraid of her own shadduh.” But I’ve often wondered, if I ever got to meet Bubba, would he have remembered.

I never had the chance. Recently, due to his old age and worsening dementia, my aunt Nancy moved Bubba to an assisted-living facility. Though he watched her grow up, took equally beautiful portraits of her as a girl, he doesn’t know her name.

Bubba’s deterioration broke Ma T’s heart to such an extent that Nancy volunteered to handle the tedious aspects of his estate on her behalf. She drove him—barefoot and clueless—to the facility, bought him a pair of shoes, furnished his new sanitary bedroom with a reclining chair and television. According to Nancy (who had seen his previous home), he now lives the life of luxury. But cleaning out his old apartment, she warned us, would require the help of a family Bubba hadn’t seen since before Y2K. So, one summer afternoon, I joined Ma T and my aunts on a trip to Gainesville to sort through the remnants of his life.

As we searched through unused reams of paper and kitchen appliances, my aunt offered me his books. By the end of our afternoon, I’d acquired a broad series of guides to ’90s computer code, Chinese Zen, vegetarianism, effective communication in the workplace. A reader of my great-uncle’s self-help collection would become an expert at persuading others while simultaneously rejecting a supporting role in America’s obesity problem. In his bedroom he’d hoarded sketchbooks, paintings, and guides to writing poems, prose, and stellar short stories. I pulled Mary Oliver and Flannery O’Connor from a cardboard box thinking, Gerald, is it? Don’t I know you from somewhere?

“Physical,” Olivia Newtown John

In the summer after college, on the way to a Pride parade, my ex-girlfriend shared with me the excellent news that her best friend had just hooked up with a man possessing “the biggest dick she’d ever seen.” I am told that it lived up to its hype. Every inch of it.

Including this girlfriend, I’ve never had a kiss that didn’t cause me, immediately, to think: How odd it is for you to put your face onto my face—and I’m supposed to like it? Admittedly, I’m only talking about two different people over twenty-three years—but do I have a problem if I’ve never sought a third?

The genuine, palpable desire to love and/or undress another person rarely affects me. Given what I know of myself, it makes sense to identify somewhere on the spectrum of asexuality. However, both friends and strangers often argue that I shouldn’t, for one of the following reasons. I either:

Have not met the right person

Am a “late bloomer” due to a trauma-induced developmental pause during adolescence, following my mom’s illness and death—OR

Take so much Prozac I don’t feel anything down there

It has become increasingly difficult to understand my friends and their desires, the risks they’re willing to take just for sex. There’s an eagerness with which my peers seem to move through relationships, be it an eagerness to get off or to feel closeness with a stranger. As if they’re constantly headed toward a future where they can look back and revel in The Days. For some of them, The Days when they had chlamydia and didn’t know it.

The summer I lived with my ex-girlfriend (kiss #2), she never stopped talking about the various girls and guys she’d fucked along the way, sometimes simultaneously. To sustain this sexual precedent, I tried hard to want to want her, to put my fingers in, bite things so tender they seemed just one jagged tooth away from stitches. I wore the damn strap-on and tried to feel comfortable. But at the end of every day, she wanted to go down and I just wanted to read poems in the dark. We lasted a month.

“On the Road,” Houndmouth

In the first three months of quarantine with my dad and stepfamily, as I prepared to move across the country for graduate school, I wrote nothing. In fact, I hardly read anything. Nothing more than the occasional BuzzFeed quiz to find out what my life’s deepest regret would be, based on my ideal breakfast sandwich (croissant for adultery, gouda for greed). I could blame this artistic lull on the world’s COVID panic, how every backlit realm of the internet said not to judge ourselves based on what we accomplished during this time. Our job was to survive rather than achieve. But my sluggishness more likely resulted from laziness. Or my dad’s endless fridge of beer.

I hadn’t lived with my dad in years. I was barely eighteen when I first moved out of his house, ready to run from his midlife crisis, which followed my mom’s death. Then, I sought serenity in my aunt’s house—the home that I fled to on long weekends, the place I brought my new college friends when they demanded to meet my family, always asking why I lived with my aunt and not my father. I’d say that he moved closer to work or back home to care for his elderly parents. I was too humiliated to admit I didn’t know where he was.

But during my college years, Dad settled down. He married my stepmom Shelley and started hosting family dinners. He started using his phone again, calling my brother and me just to talk. When I moved in at the beginning of COVID, we began to sit outside in the mornings, making bad jokes, drinking coffee, talking about politics until I could stand it no longer and had to change the subject to our recurring discussion of aliens and light speed. One night he brought me a rum and Coke and said “It’s nice having you here.” As if we’d both forgotten each other’s company.

Before quarantine, I hardly existed outside of a moving car. I’d spend days wandering between coffee shops and libraries, escaping to the next when I grew uncomfortable sitting still. But pre-pandemic, I didn’t know that my dad and stepmom own matching coffee mugs for every day of the week. Or that they sometimes steal plant buds from parking-lot medians. I wouldn’t have witnessed the ritual through which they introduce those buds into their backyard jungle, nor would I have learned the names of each of their plants: Tommy Tomato, Cissy Citronella, Alan the Aloe Vera. I wouldn’t have cared when they bought me my own moon cactus, a piece of our summer together to take with me to the Midwest. I wouldn’t have potted it or given it a name.

“You should keep him,” I told my dad when the cactus began to sprout white blossoms, knowing I couldn’t live with myself if I killed it in Ohio.

“Are you sure?” he asked, turning to Shelley, who was spraying the honeysuckle bushes.

“But he’s yours,” she said. “We got him for you.”

“I know, but he’ll be happier here.” I smiled at them standing together, guardians of a jungle they grew together. “He’s your grand-plant, and I need you to take care of him for me.”

They smiled and began to debate the best spot to keep him in. Dad walked around the yard barefoot, mapping the areas of shade and sunlight, while Shelley pointed to places rarely trafficked by their dogs. Upstairs in the guest room that they deemed mine, blackout curtains threw shadows onto my books, on the remnants of poems and essays I’d started and abandoned. Soon I’d be off to Ohio, a dank place I could call my own—leaving Sebastian the Moon Cactus to wallow in the sun.

“Cleopatra,” The Lumineers

Among the leftovers of my great-uncle’s quiet life, I came across a cassette player onto which he’d stuck an aged newspaper clipping of an interview with Bob Dylan. The tape inside was titled, in red ink, “Ideas for _________.” I couldn’t make out the last word. Ideas for what? Poems? Stories? Grand inventions? I became obsessed with the idea of connecting with a long-lost relative.

Over and over I rewound it, sped it through, listening for insight into someone I’d never known. But it revealed just Bubba repeating the same sales call on behalf of a nameless company. He begins with his full name, then reads the script to an invisible client whose questions he addresses with prescribed answers: Yes, but we’re able to do that at a quarter of the price and We’ve been in the Fort Worth area for more than fifty years. He tweaks his performance each time (shorter pause here, casual tone here) to form a foolproof equation, one to pacify even the toughest boss, because it could never lose a sale. An equation that would always pay his bills and anchor his life, so he could come home each night to hundreds of sticky notes, his walls fluttering like a cage full of birds.

“All I Ask of You,” The Phantom of the Opera

At my dad’s, I read Leroux’s Phantom into the lamplit hours of the night. I was consumed by the tale, in which an artist named Erik barricades himself inside the watery dungeon of Paris’s Opera Garnier to complete his life’s work, composing for long stretches of time, then ignoring his project for months. He remains unseen for years, a paranormal presence to be obeyed by the opera staff, managers, performers. He lives harmoniously with them, in the shadows, as long as they adhere to all requests he delivers by letter—signed, always, as The Opera Ghost.

But when shy chorus girl Christine Daaé first graces the opera stage, he decides, arguably too late, that completing his masterpiece, Don Juan Triumphant, could never guarantee a fulfilling life. Even if it were the perfect showcase of his compositional genius, he must instead search for a life where he can love someone and be loved back. Christine, he believes, is the solution: through any means necessary, he will gain her trust.

He then lures Christine into his cellar by posing as the Angel of Music, a celestial character from a story Christine’s late father told her during her childhood. Her father promised that when he reached the after-party of Heaven, he would send her the Angel by any means necessary. Erik preys on Christine’s unwavering faith and acts as the unseen Angel for months, hiding in the walls, promising greatness, earning her devotion.

This is where you and I come in—the tourists, Broadway fanatics from out of town, the general public. We watch from velvet theater seats, cursing the crying toddler two rows ahead, while Erik crawls out of his sopping hole in the earth and clutches the first lovable, extraordinary being he’s encountered, with a vigor so unpolished and beastly he can only be feared. For two hours, we await an end to a desperate ghoul’s unrequited obsession—be it in love or in blood.

“Neon River,” Keane

After Mom died I stayed close to home, even when I went to college, feeling no need to disrupt my extended family’s fragile balance. Until I moved to the Midwest for a third diploma, I’d never lived more than half an hour from my hometown in Texas.

Just as most people I knew from high school and college were beginning to get married, have babies, construct new lives only a few miles away from their parents, I moved to a new city on my own. In some ways I felt isolated, stranded from the team of people who kept me afloat through my mother’s cancers and the aftermath of her death. But in other ways, sulking alone on unfamiliar streets, far from everything I’ve ever loved, felt like the role I always knew I would play.

I imagined that it would hurt more, though. I didn’t expect to walk through these neighborhoods and grin at children on tricycles while bigger ones play basketball in the street. I thought that once I left home, I’d ignore my classwork to call my sweet grandmother every day and preorder her biweekly Walmart groceries. I thought I would cry myself to sleep every night, break down in front of my roommates, beg them to teach me how to live with homesickness. But I am stunned at how comfortable I feel. How much I adore my hundred-year-old house. My attic bedroom. The cool weather and starless nights.

I carry seven letters with me on my way to the mailbox, for my second cousins between the ages of five and ten. I am the youngest of my first cousins, each of whom had a relationship with my mother, a closeness, that I’ll always envy. They watched me grow up just as I’ve watched their children grow up. As a teenager, I visited the hospital as each kid was born, played horses and Legos, and built numerous forts. But I rarely see them anymore. Not like I did when my mom was alive.

In particular, my cousin Mindy’s twin girls loved me. They were just three when Mom died. I braided their hair, played with them instead of talking to the adults. I painted nails, dressed in fairy costumes. Whenever we went somewhere together, they chose to hold my hand when we crossed the street. But somewhere along the way, I lost my childish spirit, the imaginative bliss that made me a good playmate.

They’re eleven now, and every time I see them at holidays, having been away for too long, I am a stranger to them. Last December, my youngest second cousin asked me how I even knew his name. At five, he can’t know that I saw him the day he was born, or that I once held him tight to me on family vacation, bumbling along in a rickety Jeep through the Rocky Mountains.

So, yesterday I bought three different sticker books, stuffed dinosaurs and hearts and glittery fruits into too-small envelopes, and vigorously stamped them with my new address labels, as if pleading Please, write back to me. At the mailbox I check that each one falls correctly inside. A thousand miles from them, I send what little I can, and hope they won’t forget about me.

“River,” Leon Bridges

I had a boyfriend when my mom died (kiss #1). We wouldn’t last, as he would eventually leave—in accordance with his Mormon faith—for a two-year mission where he’d forget about me. But at sixteen, he could’ve been my soulmate—if I’d wanted him more than I wanted someone to save me. At the time, my brother was in college, and though he still lived across the hall, he hardly said four words to me in a day. My father had grown attached to motorcycles, exercise, Red Bull, and barely came home long enough to sleep. No matter what it cost, I wanted freedom from the dark swamp where my legs had grown roots, to be cut free from the ground where’d we buried my mom.

My high school boyfriend told me about God only when I inquired. “Do you believe in Hell?” I’d ask. “How do you believe in anything?” He’d calmly explain his faith as we walked around our neighborhood, sat at the tops of vacant playgrounds. I’d walk to his house in the snow just to hug his tall, lanky body. If he’d have asked, I would’ve married him—would’ve swallowed myself whole if it meant a gold-tinted life, the security of his world, the family dinners I never had. I would’ve believed anything for that dream.

For this reason, I understand the soprano plea of Phantom’s Christine Daaé. While Erik transforms her into an operatic sensation, he enslaves her to bereavement—a longing to connect with a father she desperately believes is not gone forever. By the time she belts “Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again” I often wonder if she blames herself for falling victim to the Phantom. At her father’s grave she crumbles toward the stage floor, pleading, affirming her need both to run from the Phantom and to move on from a past that no longer exists.

Perhaps that song is Christine’s final breaking point, when she realizes that if she hadn’t wallowed in grief for so long, she may not have fallen for the Angel. But to blame her for this would be unfair, because even when the one connection to her father turns rotten, saying goodbye hurts as much as staying a prisoner forever.

“God Bless the Child,” Billie Holiday

My extended family operates like a singular body—each of us an organ dependent on one another’s function. When someone moves away or dies, we adapt. Even after my mother’s death six years ago, we’ve stayed together. Though we’ve lost a few limbs along the way and our lungs aren’t what they used to be, we are immortal.

In the ’70s, my grandparents meticulously selected pecan wood paneling to cover their den—a decision they made together to craft a space that would later become iconic to their children, grandchildren, and greats. The place where all thirty-plus of them are welcome at any time. In hindsight, it’s difficult to think of Bubba’s house—a dusty one-bedroom starter apartment where he paid rent for over twenty-five years—as a home.

At one point in time, Bubba was part of our body. But eventually, he left and never came back. And for more than two decades, just an hour south of his apartment, Ma T’s house sat with an ever-revolving door, the pulsing aorta where her kids came sometimes to give and other times to take.

I know nothing about Ma T and Uncle Bubba’s lives as children. Occasionally, when she accidentally lets such personal details slip, Ma T recalls an upbringing in the context of divorce and scary drunks. At fourteen, she married my grandpa and started a family that bloomed into dozens of kids in several generations. We all know the code to the garage lock, where to find a spare key, and never to show up at her house before eleven a.m. without a Diet Coke.

My great-grandmother Verna died single, talking to birds she kept in a cage. Ma T was left with unfinished quilts and Bubba with a clock that now hangs in my bedroom. I wonder if Bubba knew that Ma T is everyone’s mother. That when we were babies, she covered each of us with the nearest fleece she could reach and rocked us back and forth, humming a song we’ll always remember by the vibration of her bones. There’s never been a kid she couldn’t rock to sleep.

“What happens to all the little babies people don’t want?” she once asked me after the six o’clock news. “You think they need somebody to volunteer—just somebody to sit there and hold ’em?”

“Total Eclipse of the Heart,” Bonnie Tyler (covered by Sleeping At Last)

The plump baby girl that my mother once raised inevitably turned into me. All that’s left of the girl she stuffed into summer dresses and pantyhose is someone who knows nothing of God and doesn’t seek to, a breathing, tattooed garden of black roses and orchids stretching from my wrist to my elbow. A flare gun of fuck yous and undefined sexuality. I haven’t worn a skirt in years.

But whenever I dream about her, my mother is unchanged. Though I am always older, no longer the dreamy kid who stared into her casket, she is the same heavy-hipped woman whose dead body I adorned with her favorite crew socks and silver hoops. She is alive in my dreams, not a ghost with clumps of irradiated skin peeling from her arms. And whenever she appears, though she never says a word, I can feel her thoughts when she stares at me. How could you?

In this subconscious world, I know that she’s been gone. I can feel the strangeness of her reappearance, the touch of an old memory. But instead of having died or been sulking in purgatory, in my dream, she has only left. She packed her bags and left us all, to find a happier life, visiting on occasion because my aunt drags her back. Come see your kids, she begs my mother in some one-bedroom walk-up where she now lives alone, surrounded by boxes of dye that fail to brighten her chemo-fried hair. Unwillingly, my mom returns, treks back home until she’s glaring at me. I thought I’d lost you and Where have you been? I say, but she turns to leave, grabbing the car keys as I scream for her to stay. I’m here, I’m right here. Every time, I am left alone in the street, staring at nothing.

“All I Ask of You (Reprise),” The Phantom of the Opera

Erik is dead at the end of Leroux’s Phantom. After he’s kissed by Christine in the only act of love or closeness he ever felt, we’re left with the elegiac responsibility of deciding how to remember him—a task that filmmakers have taken on since the novel’s publication. Phantom has been adapted into several genres: horror, romance, drama, thriller. In the 1998 version, the Phantom’s monstrosity comes not from any cosmetic disfigurations but from being raised by rats beneath the opera house. Later, in the 2004 film, we are encouraged to have faith in the Phantom, to fall in love with Gerard Butler’s pirate shirts and light chest hair. No one—filmmakers nor audiences—can determine whether the Phantom has good intentions or is purely a monster, the product of a lonely life.

I could be the kind of lover the Phantom is, willing to captivate for love’s sake. Let me show you my tricks, spin for you my web and weave you into me. Not even in Uncle Bubba’s house did I find a guide on how to embrace another life, only books on how to survive a life with oneself. Someday I may look into a mirror, my loveless eyes hollow and ashy, and realize how deep into my own cave I have buried myself. And by the time I come alive, clawing my way to the light of day, it may be too late. What great-niece of mine will come along to sort through my shit? Will she take my old books? Breathe my scent from blazers hanging in my closet, as if she might somehow recognize it? Will she have ever seen my face? What will come of my taste for solitude when each moment is both a rush of power and a horrid fear that my world is only an echo?

“Harmony,” Elton John

Fans of Elton John and Bernie Taupin debate whether “Harmony” describes an actual person or Elton John’s relationship with music. The song focuses on betrayal and heartache but, in the end, suggests always returning to what you love. I wonder if Harmony is instead a word for one’s own personal paradise.

My therapist tells me I’ve grown too attached to my happy place, the mental reality I built at age eleven after Mom’s first cancer diagnosis. Two years later, I began to live inside myself when the cancer came back as a different type. I must’ve been someplace else while she roamed through the house at night, wailing in pain. When she became so desperate for relief that I fed her a bottle of children’s Motrin like an infant. When the nurses came in, when she sobbed, when she puked into bedpans. I was always stuck in a daydream, sitting alone on the top floor of some downtown hospital, staring out at the city and dreaming of who I could be when it was over. “You did whatever you had to do to survive,” my therapist tells me. “But don’t you think it’s time to get out?”

During her worst years with cancer, Mom hardly spoke to anyone. Because of her visible spells of quiet gloominess, several family members swear that she knew she was going to die. Some days I’d walk into her room, hoping for conversation, and find her lying in bed listening to music with closed eyes. I wonder if she, too, was someplace else, saying goodbye to herself while Miranda Lambert sang “The House That Built Me.”

Mom always let me listen to my own iPod or CD player in the car. Even on days when I forgot my headphones or ran my battery dry, she’d let me sit quietly with my own thoughts as the radio played her favorite songs. She didn’t say much, but from the drum of her hands on the wheel, I knew she was in there.

“Do you ever imagine yourself singing the songs?” I asked her once. I often pictured myself as the pop star singing my music, screaming the high notes, flaunting glittery dresses and wild hair. Mom smiled, nodded.

I like to think my mother and I shared something when it came to music. Even at her healthiest, she seemed perplexed by my hotheadedness and unpredictable emotional state. But we were calm in the car. As she meditated on her past and I dreamed miles into my own future, there we were together—listening to the same song in our own little worlds.

In my new attic room, I’ve hung the black-and-white portrait that Bubba took of my mother as a child. On my first cold night, while trying to read a book, I realize that I’ve always misunderstood the picture: My mother, no older than five, wasn’t covering her ears; the rock in her palm was not a rock at all but a shell the size of her little hand. She wasn’t afraid, as I had always pictured her. She was listening to the ocean’s song.

Read more from Issue 20.2.