I did not choose these five records because critics agreed they mattered. I chose them because I remember exactly where I was standing the first time each one played.
The first was playing from a shared taxi window the week I quit a job I'd convinced myself I couldn't leave. The second arrived the same month my grandmother stopped recognizing most of us, and I have not been able to separate the song from the particular grief of watching someone forget you gently, without malice, the way a tide goes out.
The third record is the one that got the most airplay this year, the one every playlist algorithm insists on. I resisted it for months out of sheer contrarianism, and then, embarrassingly, cried to it in a parked car outside a hospital, waiting for news that turned out to be good.
The fourth is a record almost nobody I know has heard, found on a compilation a friend sent with no explanation attached. It became, without my choosing it, the song of the month I finally started writing again after a year of not being able to.
The fifth I am still deciding how I feel about. It played at a wedding two weeks ago, and I watched people twenty years younger than me dance to it with a freedom I found I wanted to reach for myself, and mostly managed to.
A year, condensed into five songs, is a lie of convenience. But it's the lie I have, and for now, it's the one that lets me hold the year at all.
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