The Woman Spotify Thinks I Am
"Meal planning and fabric softener won’t protect you from the person you always were"
I get extremely specific Spotify ads for things that are actually completely irrelevant to me… so here’s the story I’ve constructed about over the years about who the algorithm seems to think is using my account
Fiction is NOT my strength so I’m proud of myself for finishing this but it’s pretty slow for the first half lol
—
Even in the quiet of the Hartford Health Go Health Urgent Care waiting room, sitting with her little daughter Liliana collapsed across her lap, Josie’s mind is racing.
If she gets home by 5pm, she can immediately pop Liliana’s clothes into the washing machine with Tide Free & Gentle, which is dermatologist-approved for sensitive skin. She’ll spend the next 47 minutes making dinner, and while Lililana’s clothes are in the dryer, she’ll wash her clothes and her son Brady’s clothes. She uses both Downy Rinse and Refresh (formulated to remove odor than detergent alone) and Gain Scent Beads (way fresher than detergent alone).
If everything goes to plan, she can still be asleep by 9 and get eight hours of sleep before her shift tomorrow morning. But Liliana will probably need extra care. And who knows what Brady will be doing. Oh, and what will she make for dinner?
Josie’s knees and elbows are burning. She’s too preoccupied by her eczema to solve the impossible equation of her evening. She opens her phone and sends Brady a text: “Hey Brady,” she types, “Liliana has a fever and it’s probably strep so we’re at Urgent Care right now. I’m hoping we’ll be home before 5 but can you start a load of laundry for me?”
---
When Liliana is in the car, Josie plays Disney princess songs. Liliana’s precious little singing voice is her favorite sound in the world. The Spotify advertisements algorithm knows that she wants to take the kids to Disney (the most magical place on earth) as soon as she can afford it. She’ll get a new credit card—the Capital One card with extra points for traveling—and then she’ll watch Liliana’s perfect little face light up when she sees Cinderella’s castle and meets the princesses in real life.
But Liliana is deep in a Tylenol-induced nap, so Josie listens to her own music—a blend of songs she grew up singing at church camp, and the country hits that played on every radio in town when she was a kid in the late 90’s— with the volume turned down so low she can barely hear it.
The algorithm also knows Josie is thinking about going back to school. Babson and Connecticut State are two good options, it tells her. And at the University of Bridgeport, you could get your RN in as few as 20 months while still working…
She stops at a red light but keeps her hands glued to 10 and 2. She’s jittery with temptation and knows she can’t even give herself the option of scratching at her eczema.
Brady hasn’t responded to her text yet, meaning she’ll have to start the laundry herself.
His unresponsiveness isn’t unprecedented, but it still concerns her. Who knows what the boy could be up to right now? Maybe he finally went to after-school practice for the baseball team she signed him up for.
Josie knows that option is overly optimistic, but it’s still a possibility.
--
Josie nearly collapses when she scrambles into the apartment, struggling to free herself from Liliana’s backpack and her own purse and the CVS bags and the Instacart order without jostling the 30-pound child asleep in her arms.
“Mama—”
“Shhh, go back to sleep, baby. Mama’s gonna take you to bed,” she says, hushing her daughter’s raspy little voice.
Liliana nods sleepily and cuddles in a little closer.
But Josie doesn’t take her little girl upstairs to her bedroom—she walks towards the kitchen table, where Brady’s phone rests face-up and abandoned.
Next to the phone, a note reads: “Hi Mom! My phone died so I’m leaving it at home. I’m taking the bus to Taco Bell! Can you come pick me up?”
Oh my word, Josie thinks. Taco Bell? The nearest one is, like, twenty minutes away. Unless he went to the other one, which is also twenty minutes away but in the opposite direction. And he just expects me to figure it out? What is wrong with this child?
Josie puts Liliana in bed and calls a friend from church who lives nearby to ask if she can come and keep an eye on Liliana while she searches for Brady.
Laundry will not be getting done tonight.
---
I can’t believe he did this, Josie thinks. It’s literally so unsafe. He’s just a kid who doesn’t know how this big strange world works. And he can’t even speak for himself.
Even at age five, Liliana is already more observant than Brady. He just lives in his own world sometimes. Anything could happen to him.
And now our whole day is thrown off, she continues. I was supposed to wash clothes and make dinner and take care of a sick kid. Instead I’m running through every Taco Bell in the city.
She wants to scratch all up and down her arms, wants to pull over the car and satisfy the itchiness that’s been driving her crazy all day. No, she tells herself. That just makes it worse. Focus on finding Brady.
---
Brady is Josie’s best friend, her greatest challenge, her Spotify account co-owner, her teenage son.
And Brady is weird.
Josie still doesn’t understand why he left his phone at home because the boy can hardly spend a moment without listening to dubstep and phonk and punk rock. Living in his head feels like playing Call of Duty while running a marathon at 3am in a club in a post-Soviet state: he’s never really sure whether the pounding in his ears is from the subwoofers or the machine gun fire or the thunder of his own heartbeat.
The algorithm sends Josie ads suggesting that she talk to her teenage son about getting the HPV vaccination, but she doesn’t know where to begin.
Brady likes the taste of burnt food and the smell of gasoline. He prefers everything—from Sea Shanties to classical music—as an EDM remix, because he is in a constant search for whatever is louder, harder, faster, wilder. Brady’s Daylist includes Battle Royale Mix, Angry Dad Rock Mix, Goblincore Mix. When he gets bored he sits in front of the full-length mirror in Josie’s room and stares into his own eyes until he questions the existence of himself and the entire universe.
Brady just wants to feel something.
The Algorithm knows that Brady craves Taco Bell. As often as Josie thinks about laundry, Brady is dreaming of the Build-Your-Own Luxe Cravings Box with a Chalupa Supreme or Cheesy Gordita Crunch AND the Beefy 5-Layer Burrito. Every afternoon, Spotify reminds him that the Crunchwrap Supreme—seasoned beef, nacho cheese sauce, tostada shell—is calling him. Taco Bell is the itch he can’t think past. And today, he gave in.
---
When Josie finally finds Brady, it’s almost 7:30pm and the city has sunken beneath its own shadows. The sky is colorless but not yet dark. Tail lights and neon street signs glow in the grayness of dusk.
After panicky searches through the last four Taco Bells, frenzied cries of have-you-seen-my-son leveraged at cashiers, and hysteric shouts into men’s bathrooms… Josie doesn’t even have to leave the car this time.
Brady is standing at the front door of the restaurant, pale and forlorn. He searches the parking lot with wide gray eyes that look like they’ve seen empires fall and watched human civilization pass away, as if he knows what it’s like to be the only man left walking the desolate dusty earth. He’s both relieved and crushed by the sight of Josie’s charcoal Kia pulling into the parking lot.
He stares at the ground as he walks to the car, then slumps into the passenger seat without making eye contact with Josie.
“What the hell, Brady?” She asks.
Silence.
“How was I supposed to find you? I went to every single stupid Taco Bell in this whole damn town. You think I had time for this tonight? I spent all afternoon in the Urgent Care. And you didn’t even bring your phone! You could have at least waited at home until it was charged. Or brought the charger with you. Brady, what if you had gotten kidnapped? Or developed a sudden shellfish allergy and gone into anaphylactic shock? Or witnessed a carjacking? How would I have known if you needed help?”
Brady just looks out the passenger window, hiding tears he thinks he’s too old for Josie to see. He always has been—and always will be—small. But as he leans against the car window, shattered by shame, he looks even younger and smaller than he really is.
Josie sighs, tilts her head against the back of the car seat, closes her eyes, exhales. She was too hard on Brady. Again.
“I just want you to think ahead more,” she says softly. “I don’t want you to get hurt because you didn’t think through the consequences of your actions.”
Brady takes his mom’s hand, holding it in his own as he traces a circle in front of his chest, and then touches his thumb to his chin twice. I’m sorry, Mom.
“I love you,” Josie says, reaching over to hug him. “I’m just glad you’re safe.”
Where’s Liliana? Brady asks.
“Her fever came back, so I picked her up from school early to take her to Urgent Care. Mrs. Curtis is at home with her now.”
Brady nods.
---
Josie loves Brady with her whole heart. But as soon as she learned that she was pregnant with Liliana, she decided to make this baby into everything Brady would never be. So Josie listened to classical music during her pregnancy, and she continued playing it during Liliana’s infancy. Liliana wore Pampers Cruisers 360 (with a 360 stretchy waistband for up to 100 leak-free fit). Now, Liliana goes to a Montessori pre-school and eats organic snacks. Liliana wears her tufts of white-blond hair in tiny ponytails that match her outfits.
But the algorithm knows that, deep down, Josie and Brady are the same person. The algorithm would tell you that the Josie who created Liliana—the Josie who does laundry as if it were a religion and follows garment washing instructions as if they were the 10 Commandments, the Josie who gets her kids all their vaccines on time and eats 77 grams of protein every day– is a complete facade. At heart Josie is even more wild, more reckless, and more sensory-seeking than her son.
The algorithm would tell you that Josie is obsessed with having clean clothes and healthy kids because only the impossibly tight confines of perfect motherhood are unyielding enough to be stuffed with the overflowing, unresolved mess of Josie’s self.
And that’s a good thing, because Josie has to be a perfect mom. She’s already messed up everything else.
The algorithm would tell you that Josie clings to the churchy songs of her childhood the way her children wrap themselves in blankets to ward off monsters. She’s trying to convince herself that she always has been and always will be the innocent little girl who went to Sunday School. That she was never a teenager too ashamed to go back to Youth Group. That she’s an adult who could proudly take a seat in the pews of that old Baptist church. That she’s the kind of mother her hometown would approve of.
And the algorithm knows that if that’s Josie’s life, it’s destroying her.
Every once in a while, when Josie is driving alone, the algorithm asks her, but what do you really want, Josie? It’s not laundry detergent, is it? Not really.
Your head is full of numbers, Josie, but have you considered the DraftKings app? FanDuel? You’re not far away from Mohegan Sun. You’re always calculating grocery bills and credit card payments, so why not come count cards, sweetheart? You’re always predicting commute times and gas prices but life is a game you always seem to lose. Come play a game you have a chance to win.
At night the ads for eczema medications and credit cards are replaced by ads for Jack Daniels and Malibu Coconut Rum.
“Come on, Josie. How long do you think you’ll be able to hold yourself together? Meal planning and fabric softener won’t keep you from slipping back into the person you always were.
“We know who you really are,” The algorithm whispers. “Wouldn’t it be so, so easy to slide into the dusk for just one night? Wouldn’t it feel good to let go one last time?
On nights like this one, when nothing in life is going to plan, the algorithm asks Josie, “Wouldn’t it feel nice to scratch everything that itches?”
---
Josie only does one load of laundry tonight.
She takes it upstairs and drops it on her bed with a sigh. She’s too tired to fold clothes tonight.
She’s listening to music on her earbuds, and when Spotify begins playing an old hymn, Josie just lays on her bed beside the pile of unfolded laundry and cries. Silent tears stream down her cheeks.
She misses sitting on the porch of the old farmhouse, peeling potatoes while Grandma sang in a dusty soprano as comfy and lived-in as the rocking chair she sat in. Josie misses Grandma’s stuffy little church where everyone in the aging congregation knew this song by heart, and the few who didn’t scrambled to find it in the yellowed pages of tattered hymnals. But Grandma has been dead for years and Josie hasn’t been back to that little town since she was six months pregnant with Brady.
She misses childhood. She misses being a girl with big dreams in a small town, being the teenager who wanted to discover vaccines and develop laundry detergents and write the formulas for the protein drinks she gets all these advertisements for. She never wanted to be thirty years old and bone-tired, yelling at her kid in a Taco Bell parking lot.
But she wouldn’t give this life up for anything. She’s so grateful for Liliana and for Brady and a church full of friends who love all three of them. The algorithm is wrong: Josie doesn’t want clean laundry and clean music because she’s hiding from herself. She just genuinely loves God and loves her kids and wants to do the right thing.
---
Slowly, silently, Josie pushes open the door of her son’s room open and stands there, watching him sleep.
He’s somewhere between child and man and he doesn’t fit in her arms anymore, but when he’s asleep, he still looks so soft and young. She wishes she could hold him like a baby one more time, sing him to sleep the way she did all those years ago when she chose to give up her whole world for him.
She was just a few years older than he is now.
Brady never got picked up from school because he was feeling ill. She just had to beg the nurse to give him another Tylenol and send him back to class, headachy and half-awake, because she needed to work this shift and there wasn’t anyone else to take care of him. She couldn’t afford to wash Brady’s clothes with special laundry detergent or take him to Disney World or buy him name-brand diapers.
Josie looks back into Liliana’s room. She loves both her children— but Brady will always be her best friend. She and Brady bear the scars of the hardest years of each others’ lives and it breaks her heart that she couldn’t spare him the pain. She wishes she could have given him a perfect, beautiful, boring life like Liliana’s. But all she could do was just love him so, so much.
“I love you,” she whispers. “I always will.”
“And even if you’re perfect,” she whispers to Liliana’s room, “I’ll always love you too.”