Hazel James

Static Between Songs: A Story About Memory, Music, and the Tracks That Follow Us

There are certain summers that don’t seem important until much later—until the songs you once played casually suddenly echo louder than ever before. For me, that summer was 2021, and the playlist that carried it has followed me like a shadow. I didn’t build it with intention. It wasn’t something I meant to preserve. But the songs stayed, and with them, a person I thought I had finally forgotten.