Six notes. That’s all you have.
You heard it in a grocery store in maybe 2011. Or a car commercial. Or a movie trailer for a movie you never saw.
Those six notes now live in your head rent-free and armed.
The Humming Phase
You hum it to yourself. Then you hum it slightly differently. Then a third way.
By the fourth attempt you’re no longer sure you’re humming the actual song. You may have invented a new song. You may be humming a slight variation of something else entirely.
The original is degrading in real time, like a photocopy of a photocopy.
The Lyric Fragment
There are words. Two of them. Maybe three.
It’s either “hold on tonight” or “hold on to light” or possibly “cold ocean light,” which makes no sense as a lyric but is now equally plausible.
You google all three in quotes. You get a Nickelback song, a wellness blog, and a poem.
None of these are it.
The Shazam Betrayal
You wait. Weeks pass. Then one day, in a Chipotle, it plays.
You fumble for your phone. You open the app. Your hands are not fast enough. Your phone wants a face scan. The face scan fails because you’re moving.
The app opens. It listens. The song is on its last eight seconds.
“No match found.”
Shazam has heard eight million songs and it has never heard this one. You are alone.
The Interrogation of Friends
You hum it at people. This is a hostile act and you don’t care.
“It goes like — da-DA-da-daaa-da-da? With like a synth thing?”
They stare at you. They say “is it that one song?” You say which one. They say they don’t know.
One friend confidently names a song. You look it up, full of hope. It is not it. It is not even close. You are now slightly angry at your friend.
The Playlist Deep Dive
You listen to 200 songs from that general era on 2x speed, scanning for the six notes.
You do this for an hour and a half on a Tuesday night. You are a grown adult conducting a forensic audio investigation into a jingle.
You find nothing. You find three songs you’d forgotten you loved, which is a nice consolation prize but not the point.
The Dormancy
It goes away. Months pass. You forget entirely.
Then you’re pumping gas and someone drives by with a window down and you catch two seconds of it and the entire obsession reboots from a cold start.
The Ending That Doesn’t Come
You will find it eventually, in a completely unrelated context, and it will turn out to be a B-side by a band you already own two albums by, and the moment will be strangely anticlimactic.
Or you’ll never find it and it’ll surface in your brain at random intervals for the next forty years.
Either way, the six notes win.