buy the song.
/I have one song in my iTunes library.
I downloaded it on a late, hot August night, when almost a hundred people crowded into a home just a few blocks away from where I had spent the last four years studying, working, and becoming. Everyone was there to play beer pong, eat chips and salsa and chips and hummus, and have one last reckless summer night before “real life” started again in September. Most of them were there to say goodbye — to me and Steph, as we prepared to drive a UHaul (which was already parked in the driveway, already halfway loaded up with our lives) across the country to start anew in Portland. You know the rest.
I remember a lot of things about that night. I remember sneaking upstairs with one of my best friends and crying over the card she gave me and realizing our friendship would forever be altered the minute I pulled away from our hug and from Fargo. I remember sneaking away from the party to play on the nearby playground and swinging, swinging, swinging like I was in second grade again. I remember the police officer who knocked on the door, telling us that the party was over and one of our guests telling him it most certainly was not. This was my first real house party. It was all so real and all so cliche and I couldn’t stop smiling the entire night even though I was saying goodbye to all of my people. I felt like I was in a really great and really cheesy movie about college and growing up and moving on. I was, in a way. In my own movie. I was, in a way. Growing up and moving on. It was all perfect.
But I also remember this one moment — the one where I paid $1.29 to download a song. That night, my phone played the songs that kept getting interrupted by the people calling and texting, asking for directions. I turned on Spotify radio for most of the night and let BOY, Haim, and a few Top 40 hits flood the first level of the house and spill into the backyard. Somewhere between a few and several beers into the night, a few guys marched up to me with a request.
“Can we play a song?”
“Sure,” I said, as I handed over my case-free and already-cracked iPhone.
What I don’t remember is how they exited my Spotify app, bypassed searching for it on my YouTube app, and instead found it in my iTunes app and determined that this, this was the best way to listen to their song. I do remember someone passing my phone back to me a few minutes later with the “Sign In to iTunes Store” pop-up window right there, so I could authorize the purchase. I remember looking at their eager faces and giggling as I squinted at my screen and shook my head and thought how I’d spent $1.29 on worse things.
Maybe sometimes we make a choice because it will make others really happy. Or because they have kindly asked us. Maybe sometimes we make a choice because we truly, honestly don’t give two shits about the outcome. Or because we’re curious and feeling carefree. Maybe sometimes we make a choice because we think of all the harder choices we’ve made and then this one comes rushing in as a relief, an easy one, a mindless one.
I handed the phone back to them, and they set it up on the speakers, and then — it started.
“Choices,” by George Jones.
I would never have guessed in a trillion years that acoustic, country chords would gush out of my phone just then. I thought it was going to be Space Jam or R. Kelly or Jump Around or something that we all would have been excited about and then danced to or karaoked to or jumped around to. The guys who requested this song were the only people in the room who swayed and sang. (If you listen to it, you’ll realize it’s not really a song to jump around to.) I think I did a few sympathy sways with them and then went to the snack table. The party went on. (Until the cop finally did convince the previously mentioned guest that the party was most certainly over.)
There isn’t really a moral to this story. I plugged my phone into my computer for the first time in a long time tonight, and my iTunes library popped up with George Jones’ face and his dark sunglasses looking off to the left, and I immediately knew I wanted to write about it. It seems insignificant. The guys probably don’t even remember that they are the guys who did this. The others at the party probably won’t even remember this happening. But I do. I remember. And isn’t that a good enough reason for a story?
I could have deleted the song the morning after the party, as I ran through the night in my head and checked my iTunes to make sure I really did download it. I could have deleted it in the UHaul on the drive out here, as I cleared out the old on my phone to make room for the new. I could have deleted it any time in the last two years, as I plugged my phone into my laptop to save the pictures that have captured my life since that night. Instead, I’ve listened to “Choices” on repeat as I’ve written this, not only to make my grandmother proud that I’m listening to “her kind of country music,” but also to remind myself that a choice is just a choice. It’s not the end of the world or the start of our lives, even though it feels like everything in our world and our lives depends on it. We’ve made choices before and we will make them again. We will sometimes make the same choice over and over and over again and we will sometimes choose differently every single time we’re faced with it. Big and little choices, easy and hard choices, choices for others and choices that might make others mad or sad but that finally — finally — free us.
Life has us make choices all the time — sometimes ones that we are prepared for, sometimes ones that we will never be prepared for, and sometimes ones that shake up our souls in awesome and awful ways. Sometimes at the same time.
And sometimes, if we are lucky, life has us make choices that we just have to close our eyes at and throw our heads back at and giggle at as we type in our iCloud password and buy the song.
