The Playlist I Never Deleted

The Playlist I Never Deleted

By [kine Willims]

It starts with a song. Always does.

The first time I heard it, I was fourteen, riding shotgun in my cousin’s beat-up Honda Civic, the windows cracked and the speakers trembling under the weight of teen angst and 2000s pop-punk. The song—All Time Low’s “Weightless”—came through the static like a promise. A promise that things might get better, that being misunderstood was just part of the journey, and that somehow, someone out there got it. I asked him to replay it three times. He laughed, but he did.

That same afternoon, I went home and made a playlist on my iPod Touch. I called it “Fuel.” Not because I liked cars, but because those songs felt like gasoline—igniting something in me I hadn’t understood yet. It had Fall Out Boy, Paramore, Panic! at the Disco. Songs that shouted instead of whispered, that loved loud, cried harder, and clung to chaos like it was religion. That playlist became my armor through the mess of high school, my secret language when words failed.

I never deleted it. Not when I switched phones, not when I changed music apps. It was always tucked away in the library—like an emotional time capsule, untouched but never irrelevant.

College came, and “Fuel” morphed. New songs slipped in. Lorde, Bon Iver, early Frank Ocean. The energy slowed, the themes deepened. Less “burn it all down,” more “what now?” I still walked to class with earbuds in, but now it wasn’t to escape—it was to feel. I was unraveling in new ways. Quiet ways. And the playlist listened without judgment.

There’s a strange kind of loyalty you develop with music that grows with you. Some songs fade like summer flings; others stay, like fingerprints on your soul. I couldn’t always relate to the teenage drama anymore, but I remembered the kid who could. And that memory kept the playlist sacred.

By the time I started my first real job, “Fuel” had become a mishmash of moods. Commute anthems. Breakup ballads. Rainy-day jazz. At times it felt more like a diary than a playlist—each track a post-it note from a version of me I was either trying to hold on to or trying to forget.

I remember one day in particular: a Tuesday morning, hungover from a breakup that hadn’t made sense. I hit shuffle on “Fuel” just to fill the silence. What came on wasn’t even a sad song. It was Vampire Weekend’s “Oxford Comma”—upbeat, absurd, and oddly therapeutic. I laughed. For the first time in days. And I realized the playlist wasn’t just a museum of heartbreak or rebellion. It was comfort food. Familiar. Forgiving.

Now, years later, I rarely open it. My taste has shifted. I listen to more soul, more silence. But I know it’s there. I scroll past it on lazy Sundays, sometimes tempted to revisit. When I do, it’s like stepping into an old bedroom—posters still on the walls, sheets slightly too small for the bed, everything drenched in nostalgia. The songs don’t hit the same, but they still hit something.

What surprises me most is not the songs I’ve added over the years, but the ones I never removed. That cringey Owl City track? Still there. That overplayed Ed Sheeran ballad? Front row. And I think, maybe that’s what growing up really is—learning to live with the parts of yourself that no longer serve you, but made you who you are.

We curate our lives constantly—deleting photos, rewriting bios, editing pasts. But the playlist I never deleted remains one of the few things I’ve let live unchanged. Not because it’s perfect. But because it tells the truth.

“Fuel” is a reminder that there were moments I didn’t think I’d make it through—but I did. That I’ve felt enough to build a 4-hour soundtrack of chaos, longing, joy, and change. That I was someone once who needed these songs like oxygen.

And maybe, someday, someone will ask me why I still have that old playlist. I’ll probably just smile and say,

“It reminds me who I was. And who I’ve survived being.”