Time travel.

I'm convinced the closest thing we have (and perhaps will ever have) to time travel is music. In seconds, a song can take you back years. There are other things that trigger memories -- sights and smells and such -- but music has this rare ability to transport you back to a particular moment (or even particular people) from your past. 

It might be purely accidental. A song comes on the radio, one you haven't even thought of in ages, and all of the sudden you find yourself back in your hometown, riding in the bed of someone's pickup a couple days after your high school graduation, feeling that this night is somehow incredibly significant -- that soon, people will move and things will change, and that you should try to take it all in because someday in the distant future, you'll want to remember how things were.

And for those three minutes and thirty-four seconds, you do remember. And quite clearly.

Or maybe it's purposeful. You're missing your best friends, so you put on that CD you always used to play in the car when you made your weekly run to Sonic for happy hour, and the memories come flooding back and you can't help but smile as you sing along.

Regardless of how it happens, it happens. And it's a wonderful and incredible thing.

I put this on, for example, and it's suddenly 2006, and I'm getting the longest hug of my life, because we both know that as soon as we let go, one of us will be moving far far away.

  

And this will forever remind me of the summer of 2008 and asking if Penland was open and whether or not we should just go play volleyball at the SLC and order pizza.

 
  

This one (forgive me) makes me laugh, transported back to my graduation from Baylor, and how "the party don't start till I walk in" played as we pulled up to the ceremony.  

 

This makes me think of winter in Illinois -- watching the white slowly pile up against our window while we stayed inside and baked our way through the Snowpocalypse.

 

And this makes me think of dancing spontaneously in the kitchen, but only during the chorus, because once the verse hit we went back to nonchalantly tending to the pots on the stove.

There are so, so many more. And more often than not, they catch me by surprise. Not only that I remember all the words (which, by the way, how is that even possible?) but also how an event that hasn't crossed my mind in years is instantly brought to the forefront, crystal clear, with all the accompanying emotions. It's an incredible thing.

What songs take you back?