Custody of the Playlist

Nobody warns you that the hardest thing to divide is not the house or the china or the retirement account. It is the shared Spotify playlist — the one titled, in an act of pre-marital optimism, Forever Songs.

There are one hundred and forty-two tracks on it. I added Landslide. He added Thunder Road. We both added This Must Be the Place, six months apart, without noticing. That fact alone once felt like a marriage.

I cannot bring myself to delete it. I also cannot bring myself to listen to it. So it sits in my library like a locked room in a house I still live in.

The songs I am giving him in the divorce

• Anything by Wilco. He loved them first.
• Harvest Moon. Our first-dance song. He gets to keep it. I would not survive hearing it in a grocery store.
• The entire back catalog of The National, which we discovered together on a road trip through Vermont in a rental car that smelled like French fries.

What I am keeping

• Landslide. It was mine before it was ours.
• The Sunday-morning playlist I built during the last, worst year of the marriage, which he never once asked about. It turns out I made it for myself.
• The right to make a new one. Which I am doing, slowly, one song at a time, mostly late at night, mostly alone, and — I am surprised to find — mostly with something that feels almost like joy.