Shuffle: A Poem

There are so many songs in my library. I’m not sure what I should listen to, so I turn on shuffle.

When I press play, I enter a world of possibilities—limited only by the songs I’ve liked. Each one carries its own emotion, its own personality, its own story. But they all make up the soundtrack of my life.

When I lose sight of who I am, I turn on shuffle and I press play. Each verse, each chorus, each bridge, each track sings to a memory in my soul. Some good, some bad, but they’re all part of my life’s discography.

Some people get to set their own tracklist—with the perfect songs in the perfect order to tell a perfect story.

My tracklist changes every day. When shuffle tells me to listen to a song I don’t want to hear, I hit the skip button. I can hit that button as many times as I want, but there’s still a reason that track plays. There’s a reason that track was in my library in the first place. At some point, that track created a feeling. It created a memory. But today, I don’t want to revisit that feeling. I don’t want to revisit that memory.

Shuffle is a gift because it picks what I should listen to. Shuffle is a curse because the songs tell me how I should feel, and the previous never matches what’s next. At some point, I should turn shuffle off and listen normally—in an order that makes sense.

But today, I don’t the have the sense. I don’t trust myself enough to make the right choice on my own. So I’ll leave it up to an algorithm with all of my past choices, hoping what was good enough for me then is good enough for me now.

Shuffle.

Play.

Skip.

Skip.

Skip.

I choose in the moment without even realizing it…maybe I do know what to leave behind. A song sang yesterday can’t sing today’s words. The melody of a page turning in the calendar is the sweetest sonnet I’ve ever heard.

Are you sure you want to delete this playlist?

Yes.

…

…

File.

New Playlist.

…