No Snow in Arizona

I’ve lost most of what I used to own.

The last storage unit went in 2017. I was still using then and my priorities were somewhere else entirely, and by the time they weren’t, the unit was gone and everything in it with it. Music equipment. Computers I’d had for years, with more on the drives than I want to sit and think about. Graduation photos. The only pictures of my family I had.

There were losses before that and there have been some since — sometimes my own doing, sometimes trusting the wrong person, sometimes just how things worked out. But 2017 is the one that took the record with it. There’s almost nothing left of me from before 2018. No videos. No audio. No notebooks full of drawings kids made for me. No school photos, mine or anybody else’s.

For a while I had a handful of things I’d pulled off Facebook years back. Those accounts are gone now too.

So when I say I found some photographs, I want to be clear about what that means.

Photographs of my nieces — my sister’s girls — from around 2012, in an old wallet I haven’t carried in years, sitting inside an old laptop case I had no real reason to open. They survived when nothing else from that stretch did, and they survived by accident. There was no system. Nothing about it was preservation. They just happened to be somewhere nobody moved.

It’s a little like I started existing in 2018. Which is also more or less when I stopped running from my own gender and started dealing with it instead, so if a record has to begin somewhere that isn’t the worst place for mine to begin. But for my sister’s three girls, and for my other sisters’ kids, there’s nothing. What I have fits inside a wallet.

Most people have family albums and old videos and take them entirely for granted.

I have soundtracks and memories.

I should explain how that part works, because I don’t think it works the same way for everybody.

Music runs through me constantly. In me, around me, underneath everything — a river, and I’m a pebble in it getting rolled along. That’s as close as I can get to describing it. I don’t put music on. I’m in it.

Which means I don’t really have memories so much as I have soundtracks with memories welded to them. I can hear four bars of something and get put back — not remembering the room, standing in it. The specific chair. What the light was doing. What I was worried about that week. Everything I’ve spent real time with has a location attached, and the weld holds whether I’d like it to or not.

Most days that’s the best thing about me. It’s most of why I play, and it’s why I’ve spent nearly thirty years trying to learn how to do it to somebody else.

Some days it means I can’t listen to Tull.

What 2012 was

I’ve been listening to 2012 since the photographs turned up.

Mike Oldfield, mostly. Tubular Bells, and then Amarok, which is a single sixty-minute track that refuses to settle into being any one thing, and which I’ve had running more or less continuously for days. Jethro Tull. Zappa. King Crimson, Rush, Floyd, Dream Theater. Porcupine Tree, and Soen, who were brand new then and sounded enough like Tool that I kept checking the credits. And then everything further out — Anoushka Shankar, Áine Minogue, Christopher Tin, Centipede, traditional Japanese and Egyptian and Celtic recordings, whatever I could turn up on a slow connection at two in the morning. I was all over the place. That was the point.

Today was a therapy day, and a hard one. I’ve been doing brainspotting, which I’m not going to explain here beyond saying that it goes places. So this evening I’m sitting inside Amarok with the lights down and I’m not entirely in 2026.

Here’s what 2012 actually was.

I was in community college and it wasn’t going especially well. My mother was sick with a rotating cast of illnesses and I was helping manage that. I had friends, but nearly all of them lived inside a screen. I was isolated in the way you don’t notice until afterward, because at the time you’re just busy.

The best part of that whole stretch was weekends with my nieces.

Three girls. Red hair, blue eyes. The eldest and I were closest — my mother and I had a large hand in raising her through her first few years, and by 2012 she was old enough to have opinions, and one of her opinions was that I was worth listening to. I started teaching her guitar. I have no idea how much of it stuck. I remember exactly where we sat.

There was a lot of fighting going on around all of us in those years. Adult noise that none of them were old enough to be hearing. But then there’d be a weekend, and there’d be the girls and cartoons and anime and whatever record I was living inside of that month, and for two days the noise was somewhere else.

That was also, and not by coincidence, the most formative stretch my playing has ever had. I learned more in that period than in any three years since. All that avant-garde stuff cracked something open in how I thought about structure and time. So the music I used to get through those years is also the music that made me the player I am, which is also the music with those girls in it.

You can’t unpick that. I’ve tried. The threads run through each other.

My sister died in 2020. I thought that was the loss. It turned out to be where the losses started.

The eldest and I aren’t in contact now. It’s been about two years. I’m not going to write about why — partly because I don’t actually know why, and mostly because it isn’t the kind of thing that belongs on a website. She’s a person with her own life and her own reasons and she doesn’t owe me an explanation just because I’d like one. I’m not saying that to sound gracious about it. I’m not gracious about it. I’m just clear that the wanting is mine to carry and not hers to answer.

People will tell you grief is about learning to move on. I don’t think that’s right, or at least it isn’t right for me. When the past is stored in sound, and the sound is still playing, and you’re the one playing it — the past isn’t behind you. It’s in the next room. You don’t move on from the next room. You learn to live in the house.

The snowman

The one that takes me down worst isn’t Oldfield or Tull.

It’s Frozen.

The youngest was five. There’s the part early on where Anna is outside the door asking her sister to come out and play, and every single time, without fail, I hear my niece instead. That exact pitch a five-year-old has when she wants you to come do something with her and has already decided that no isn’t a real answer.

We were in Arizona. There was no snow. There was never going to be any snow. She’d have asked me to build one anyway.

I don’t know why that’s the detail that gets me rather than any of the bigger ones. Maybe because it’s the purest version of the whole thing — a kid asking for an impossible thing in a place that couldn’t supply it, from an aunt who’d have found some way to fake it if she could have. Maybe just because Disney is extremely good at their job and I have no defenses.

Where this leaves me

I have a theory about the hoarding.

I keep everything. Terabytes of music. Every file I’ve ever made, backed up in three places, and the backups backed up. The obvious reading is that I hold on this hard because I’ve lost this much, and I’ve told myself that version plenty of times. It’s tidy. It has a moral.

I also have the opposite theory, which is that I let go of things far too easily — that somewhere along the line I learned not to put much value in objects at all, on the grounds that things you don’t value can’t hurt you when they go.

Both of those are probably true, depending on the day.

And I suspect both are also a way of not looking straight at the simpler thing, which is that losing a coffee mug can absolutely wreck me. Not a meaningful mug. Any mug. I’ll be completely fine and then I won’t be, and it will have nothing to do with the mug.

So: no resolution. That’s most of why I’m writing it down.

What I’ve got is a handful of photographs that survived by accident when almost nothing else did, a playlist that works as a time machine with no return ticket, three girls who were the best part of some hard years, and a relationship to all of it that I’m working on once a week in a room with someone who’s very good at her job.

Amarok runs about sixty minutes and I’ve got twelve or so left. Then I’ll probably start it over.

That isn’t moving on. But it’s Thursday, and the music’s still going, and some days that’s the arrangement.