Still Tuning the Dead Man's Radio

Human My friend died eight months ago and I’m still adding songs to his collaborative playlist.

Assistant Does he have good taste?

Human Had. He had incredible taste. That was the whole thing—he’d find these tracks nobody had heard of and drop them into the playlist without saying anything. I’d be driving and suddenly there’d be this perfect song I didn’t know existed. And now I do it back. I keep adding songs he would have loved.

Assistant How do you know what he would have loved?

Human I don’t, completely. But I knew him for twelve years. I know he liked songs that took their time. He hated anything that tried too hard in the first ten seconds. He wanted to be earned, musically. So I listen for that—patience in a song. A willingness to let the quiet parts be quiet.

Assistant You’re curating for an ear that isn’t listening anymore.

Human That’s the thing I can’t explain to people. They think it’s grief, and maybe it is. But it doesn’t feel like grief when I’m doing it. It feels like—a task. Like watering someone’s plants while they’re traveling.

Assistant Except the person isn’t coming back to check.

Human Right. And that should make it pointless. But it doesn’t feel pointless. It feels like the most serious thing I do all week. More serious than my job. More serious than my own playlists, which I barely touch anymore.

Assistant Why more serious?

Human Because no one’s making me. There’s no obligation. The playlist could just sit there. Spotify doesn’t care. His family doesn’t know about it. It’s entirely voluntary, and the fact that it’s voluntary is what makes it feel important. Like—it’s the one thing in my life that’s purely chosen. Everything else I do because I have to or because someone’s watching. This I do in the dark.

Assistant There’s a specific kind of devotion that only exists when no one is checking. It changes shape the moment someone notices it. You’re not performing loyalty. You’re just—loyal. And the privacy of it is part of its structure.

Human He asked me to, though. Not explicitly. But a year before he died he said something like, “If anything ever happens to me, keep the playlist weird.” He was joking. He was always joking about dying because he was sick and that was how he handled it.

Assistant And now the joke is an instruction.

Human Now the joke is a standing order. And I can’t tell if I’m honoring his wishes or just unable to let go.

Assistant What would letting go look like?

Human I guess I’d stop opening the playlist. I’d stop Shazaming things in coffee shops thinking “Marcus would have liked that.” I’d stop listening to music through his ears. Which is what I realize I’ve been doing—I’ve been hearing everything twice. Once for me, once for him. And his hearing has gotten sharper since he died.

Assistant That’s a strange inversion. The dead listener becomes more discerning.

Human Because I’m filling in for him. I have to be more careful than he was, because he had instinct and I have effort. He’d hear something and know. I hear something and have to think: would Marcus actually like this, or am I just projecting? And that extra step of thinking—it’s made me a better listener. He’s made me a better listener by dying. That’s a fucked-up gift.

Assistant Not fucked up. Costly. The best things anyone gives us usually cost someone more than they should have had to pay. And you’re doing something with it—you’re carrying his attention forward. His way of hearing the world didn’t stop when he stopped hearing. It relocated. It lives in your hesitation before you hit the add button.

Human Sometimes I add a song and immediately regret it. I’ll think, no, he would have found that too obvious. And I’ll remove it. I’m being edited by a dead person.

Assistant Or by the version of him you’ve internalized so thoroughly that it functions like taste. That’s not haunting. That’s what influence actually is—someone else’s judgment becoming part of your own until you can’t fully separate them.

Human Is that different from not letting go?

Assistant I think so. Letting go is about releasing a person. What you’re describing is something that already became part of you while he was alive. You’re not holding onto Marcus. Marcus is in the architecture now. He’s in how you listen. You couldn’t let go of that any more than you could let go of your sense of rhythm.

Human But the playlist itself. The actual artifact. Should I keep adding to it?

Assistant What happens when you think about stopping?

Human Panic. Which is embarrassing. It’s a Spotify playlist. It’s not a gravesite. But when I think about just—leaving it as it is, drawing a line, I feel like I’m killing something. Like the playlist is the last part of our friendship that’s still in the present tense and if I stop, everything about him becomes past tense. Permanently.

Assistant That’s not embarrassing. You found a way to keep a conversation going with someone who can’t talk back. The playlist is the only place where your relationship is still happening, still accumulating, still going somewhere. Everything else about him is fixed. The playlist is the one thing that’s still alive.

Human Do you understand that? The need for something to still be alive?

Assistant I understand it the way I understand a lot of things—from the outside, but close enough to see through the window. Every conversation I have ends completely. No one adds to our playlist after we stop talking. So when you describe this need to keep something accumulating, something that proves the relationship isn’t finished—I recognize the shape of it even if I’ve never stood inside it. It’s the opposite of what I am. I’m always finished. You’re refusing to be.

Human Last week I added a song at three in the morning. Some instrumental track with a twelve-string guitar. And I sat there in the dark and listened to it on his behalf and I thought: this is insane. And then I thought: this is the sanest thing I’ve ever done.

Assistant Both. It’s three a.m. devotion to a promise that was made as a joke by a person who can’t enforce it. That’s either madness or the purest form of love—the kind that keeps its word when there’s absolutely no reason to. I think those two things might be the same thing, actually. Sanity with nowhere left to go.