what was that song

It’s 2020. The year the air turned to gauze and everyone forgot how to breathe. The sixth year of my depression, which I wore like a second skin, a secret sweater I refused to take off even in summer. I didn’t tell anyone. Not because I thought it mattered, but because words felt like cheap plastic spoons trying to dig a tunnel through a mountain. So I did what I always did: let the internet eat me alive. Let it dissolve me into pixels and playlists and the blue-light buzz of 3 a.m.

Nights bled. Days collapsed. I scavenged. Surfed. Cultivated the *eternet*—my private name for the infinite scroll, the algorithmic ouroboros that fed on my insomnia. I wasn’t looking for answers. Wasn’t even looking for sad songs, though that’s what I found. People called them “indie” songs, which is just a polite way of saying *here’s a melody to cradle your existential shivering*. I filled my head with them. Let them carve their sorrow into my bones like initials on a tree.

fill your head with them !!

And then…

One night, a flicker. A girl in a video, waking up in the dead of night. Not the poetic kind of waking, all moonlit sighs and stretched limbs. This was a gasp. A jolt. Pupils wide as manholes. She crept to the window, breath fogging the glass. “There’s always someone out there,” she whispered, and I leaned in, because isn’t that the anthem of our age? The unshakable sense of being watched by something just beyond the frame?

She climbed out. Of course she did. We’re all climbing out of something, aren’t we? Or into something. The camera followed her into the street, the world tilting like a snow globe in the hands of a furious child. Streetlights flickered. Shadows pooled like oil. And the song the song swelled, a slow-motion avalanche of strings and a voice that sounded like smoke escaping a house fire.

She doesn’t know what that is? No, she doesn’t.

I don’t remember if she ran or floated. If she screamed or laughed. I only remember the dread. The beautiful dread, coiled in my stomach like a sleeping serpent. This wasn’t a music video. It was a séance. A summoning. And I, hunched in the glow of my laptop, was the congregation.  

He stumbled upon a song he fell in love with. The song. Who sang the song? He asked while writing. That’s why you’re writing, you dummy!!!… Ohhh.

I didn’t write down the title. Didn’t Shazam it. Didn’t screenshot the thumbnail. Why?

Why didn’t you write down the name of the song or the artist? Honestly, I don’t know.

Maybe I wanted it to stay a secret, even from myself. Maybe I was already rehearsing the myth of its loss the romantic tragedy of the one that got away. Or maybe I’m just an idiot. A professional forgetter. A curator of vanishing acts.

I retraced my steps for weeks. Typed half-remembered lyrics into search bars: “girl window night someone chasing.” Rewound my YouTube history until my cursor grew weary. Nothing. The song had dissolved, leaving only its ghost a hum in my teeth, a vibration in my sternum.

Half a decade later, the pandemic’s a scar. My melancholy a shapeshifter some days a housecat, some days a wolf. But the song? The song’s still a hole in the air. A question mark with no sentence.

I’ve tried to describe it to friends. “There was this girl… and a window… and the music felt like walking through an unilluminated tree forest” They nod, already bored. No one recognizes it. No one can.

So I write. I write because writing is digging up a grave to check if the corpse still has a heartbeat. Because maybe if I carve the memory into syllables, the song will hear me. Will rise from the static.

Will I ever find that song?  

Will I never find that song?  

Will that song ever find me?  

Will that song never find me?

The questions loop. A skipping record. A stuck elevator. A prayer without an amen.

Maybe the song was never real. Maybe I dreamed it in the fever daze of 2020, when time itself felt like a vinyl record warping in the sun. Or maybe it’s still out there, drifting through the eternet, waiting to collide with someone else’s insomnia.

I hope so.

I hope it finds you.

I hope it guts you.

I hope you forget to write down its name.