Nostalgia's going to kill me

About a month ago on Spotify I created a playlist called "Spain 1997-2000" for the sole purpose of archiving the songs I used to listen to all the time back then, when I would sit in my room with my tape recorder (how old school! xD) with Los 40 Principales on the radio and I would press "play/record" whenever a song I liked came on so I could stick the tape in my Walkman (gotta love the late '90s!) and listen to my favorite songs from the radio as I walked the twenty minutes to school and the twenty minutes back.

The truth is, I haven't really listened to the playlist until just last night when I decided to put it on again and put some more songs onto the playlist.  I shuffled through it when I first made it but skipped each song after about thirty seconds so I knew which songs were in there.  And it's crazy, because so many of these songs I literally haven't listened to in years, and by years I mean ten, eleven, twelve years.  So naturally, because music is an incredibly powerful mnemonic device for me (personally, music works far better than scent for me; scent loses its memory powers after a while, while music...something always remains of those memories for years on), when I listen to songs like "Summer Son" by Texas or "Depende" by Jarabe de Palo, or "Fly Away" by Lenny Kravitz I can see myself sitting on the wood floor of my bedroom, looking out towards Artea and the highway running from Bilbao to Algorta.  I can also still smell the Bilbao Metro when it was still virtually brand new: frosted metal, plastic, and faint velvet upholstery.

It's nuts.  So many memories.  Memories of walking to school at eight in the morning, memories of driving to Burgos to play in the snow (it rarely, if ever, snows in the Basque Country so we used to drive to the border with Burgos and the mountains to see it), memories of driving to Urkiola and other parks, memories of rainy days in Bermeo, memories of driving to Bermeo with a friend from camp because she was the only person besides one to be in town for my birthday and I was invited to spend some time with her family, and then being told "Oh by the way, just so you know, we usually speak Euskera at home but for you, we'll speak Spanish!"  Memories of paying 500 pesetas to go the movies on Saturday nights with my friends at the Puerto Deportivo in Getxo and the trip to the Aquarium and beach in Donosti.  Of walking from our school out into Berango and over the hills, getting muddy and enjoying the scenery on a Physical Education field trip and not feeling tired until I was on the final stretch home.  Of youth retreats in Estella and hikes in the Sierra de Urbasa as well as trips into the city.  Of how when my best friend would talk about going to her pueblo in León I decided Estella was going to be mine.  Of sitting in the Brussels airport for five hours waiting for a flight to Oslo on a family vacation.

I honestly believe that some of the best years of my life were 1998-2000, and listening to music from back then confirms it.  It's better than having pictures to look at, because as long as I still have something to jog my memory of crazy events from my childhood and remember things I did, places I went, friends I hung out with, and other random things that I probably wouldn't even think about unless I had something to remind me about all those things.

This is why music is my drug of choice.  It keeps creating memories for me, and I'm going to keep creating playlists of my life.  And I'm going to listen to them whenever I feel like I need to take a step back and remind myself of the good times I've had.