Did I spend this weekend meaningfully?

Beijing’s gale trapped me at home with nowhere to go. (My Forbidden City reservation, noooo.) I had firmly resolved to use the time for serious study. What actually happened: MC, launch! Plus puzzles. I was supposed to take responsibility for my service. I was supposed to improve at my part-time work, even teach a classmate. I was supposed to tutor another classmate in English. I was supposed to submit every assignment and the paper before leaving. I was supposed to make time to talk with my parents. I was not supposed to forget my daily Bible reading…

And yet that was how the weekend passed, never to return.

…

While listening to music tonight, I suddenly heard Sea of Light Through the Cracks, the song I loved to sing late at night in Malaysia. Somehow, tears began to fall. That had been a difficult time. Medium⁵ going dormant changed the tiny Chinese Vocaloid community enormously; many longtime fans drifted away or left entirely, even as the fan community remained as lively as ever. The song I found then was the final work left by one old fan before their departure. Its production team was astonishingly lavish—they even brought back Xiaoshao, a veteran illustrator from the Quadimension era, for the artwork—yet the song never became more than moderately popular… I was convinced, though, that I had found treasure. I played it over and over, slowly learned to sing it, and frequently gave full concerts in the bathroom KTV.

Music by itself is only melody; people give it meaning. A creator certainly has something they wish to express, but the listener may never grasp that original intent. Instead, listeners fold fragments of their own lives into those notes, preserving one fleeting moment forever. That is why listening to music feels so much like photography to me, and why I love them both. Just as an old photograph can summon the feeling of a place, a familiar melody can stir something in the heart when you hear it again.

My music habit is to hunt down songs, save them locally, and listen on my own. The advantage is an unrestricted library with no fear that anything will be taken down. The disadvantage is that I keep circling the same handful of tracks. My current “My” playlist—why does that sound like a tongue twister?—contains more than a hundred songs spanning the early Chinese Vocaloid era through the age of AI, most of them retuned covers. When the old tracks wear me out, I create a “Temporary” playlist and loop whatever new songs I find. Once the muscle-memory habits have faded through neglect—why have rhythm games entered this explanation now? Never mind, you understand—I merge the two into one larger playlist. Back when I listened intensely, this cycle never lasted more than a month. This time, the “what is long divided must unite” process took half a year.

The reasons are complicated and difficult to explain. For one reason or another, I made fewer lyric files and listened to less music. When I finally decided to move “Temporary” back into “My,” I was bound to hear this song.

And bound to remember that earlier time.