press_play raze some of the musicians i used to know still have myspace pages. most of their pictures are still there. you can read the names of some of their songs. the songs themselves are gone. you press play and the system buffers forever, searching for a file that doesn't exist anymore. there's something about the death of a digital thing that haunts me. because some of the ghosts are still floating around. you get words without music. you get a face without a name. you get a bit of sound trying to fight through thick static. you listen so hard your eyes start to burn, and you hear a bass guitar, and a floor tom, and a sharp intake of breath. then it all fades away. one night katie thought she'd record some random things on her computer. she'd never done that before. she had an old classical guitar, some free recording software, and a cheap, noisy headset microphone. she spent two hours building two songs out of nothing but her imagination and the delirium of not knowing what she was doing. when it was three in the morning she decided to make a last.fm page instead of a myspace page. when it was four she thought it was time to try and get some sleep. everyone liked "badoomya". it was this wild stomping frenzied thing that sounded like a tune-yards song before there were any tune-yards songs. but the one that tore a chunk out of my chest was "drinktoast". she layered these harmonies that sounded looped. a chain of half-broken sighs. she fingerpicked a few chords and sang in a voice that sounded sixty years older than it was. it was the sound of her soul on digital tape. even the hiss was beautiful. "i love all your different voices," i told her. "strange things happen to my voice in the later hours of the day," she said. i should have downloaded that song. i thought it would always be there. i was wrong. there's still a grainy picture of her on her profile page. she's wearing her family. two of her brother's scarves around her neck. a sweater knitted by her grandmother. an aunt's old coat. her grandfather's hat. a puppet signifying a long-lost cousin covering one hand. a coffee mug her father made in the other. a framed picture of her mother between her arms. and there, in the crook of her elbow, the melodica i gave her. i wasn't family. she called me her brother from another mother. it's enough to make you want to cry when you think about all you've lost that was never yours to miss. maybe you just dreamed it. maybe the dream was so real you believed it for a while, until you woke into your unravelling and a scarf became a torn blanket too thin to keep you warm, and you had to burn it to stay alive. i know the song was real. i know it because i lived inside it once. i was at her house, sitting at the piano after sitting on the floor and singing one of my own songs, hearing her whisper to her mother how much she loved it before they both sang along like they'd always been there haunting me in the spaces between the notes. katie started playing the song no one loved the way they should have. anna picked up one of the wordless vocal lines. her mother grabbed the high harmony. i added a third part that wasn't there in the recording and played high, twinkling notes on the white keys. soft as snowflakes. katie sat beside me on the piano bench and smiled through her singing. and for a little less than three minutes, we were blood. 211220 what's it to you? who go blather from