iTunes is on shuffle.

• Justify My Thug (Danger Mouse) - Jay-Z. When your parents come home, they see that you sat in your room, door open, completely within earshot of anyone in the entire house, on your computer at your table, instead of sitting in the living room with your brother as he watched TV. Parents (father) get angry. Takes laptop and iPod and headphones and phone that you had brought out into the living room and set on the couch, not realizing that meant they were suddenly public property. Yell, slam things. The next morning, a dark and sleepy bus ride awaits you. Load an SD card with two albums you luckily had on your USB drive. Insert said SD card into the MP3 player from seventh grade you dug up from dusty back-of-somewhere. Kid A at 8kbps and The Grey Album are your new best friends as you concentrate on the darkness, the hunger, the inconvenience of trying to contort into a nap on the bus and your destructive boyfriend and your inability to communicate with your father.
• Bones - The Act of Estimating as Worthless. He sighs behind you on the leather couch, out of your sight, as he hears the meloncholic lyrics. You relax in darkness but for the orange and purple Christmas (Halloween) lights strung across the top of the tapestry and dancing around the room. Your habit of never noticing lyrics until way too late shows itself, in trying to present this soft, cute album and the first track turns out to probably be about breaking up. New memories of warm apple cider + cinnamon schnapps sit in your stomachs, the slow type of burn that makes you sigh, "before your eyelids fall, surrendering to slumber," plus the melatonin pills in his belly don't hurt. "Please don't, don't run away from here. I am fearful, please stay where I can see you, my dear." Listen, you and he worry about hopefully the same things, the same thing... but probably not, because you see too late that you are far too hopeful.
• Family Business - Kanye West. Even though you made this album your favorite months before you even met her, even though you've heard this song a hundred times by now, it becomes molded new under this new friendship that feels old. You get in your car at 10 p.m., because fuck the friends you thought you had. Who else will go to the store with you at this hour just to get fruit? to get mixers? No one but her, because making friends is hard when you don't try. She knows what you mean when you say family, so not your moms and your dads we kind of dislike, but your half-brothers and your grandmas who raised us too.