My iPod Classic. The biggest that ever existed (over 100 GBs, something so absurd now). It is Grey. Scratched. My most prized possession, then and now.
…I can never again plug it into the computer. All of the songs would disappear, replaced with whatever is in my library now (a few purchased albums I suppose). The misnamed Limewire songs the songs I got from my friends and the songs I copied off of CDs from the library would be gone in just a second. They only exist, like in that form, in that time, on that IPod.
Inside the grey ipod, slim but much heavier than my iphone,
it is 2010 or 11 or 12 or maybe, maybe, 2013 (i clung)
I am wearing super tight skinny jeans, dark wash.
I wear my blazers to the club.
And the iPod is filled with MGMT and Passion Pit, Kesha and the Black Keys, and Lorde eventually. The sounds of the last gap of my coming-of-age because as Taylor sings “my coming of age has come and gone.”
but sometimes I pull it out and plug it into the charger that is now multiple generations out of date, that is doubly obsolete, that I had to order again and again and again. I put in the headphones I keep for it, wired of course. Over the ear too.
And then I hit shuffle and I close my eyes and suddenly I am 20 years old and the world is before me and I am so sure I will take it on, head first, in my indie sleaze tights ripped through the crotch and my mini skirt. I can taste the Diet Coke, the midnight dominos, the 40s I helped kill on the stoops of so many boys, only a few I remember, as I feel the cool weight of the metal in my hand.
I keep it to remember her, to remember when I was 20 and a girl with those big dreams and tiny skirts.