Before moving to Chicago, I had about six weeks to get shit done. After I quit my job, there were eight hours each day to pack, make phone calls, set up appointments, tie up loose ends. And I hustled. I got shit done.

Around 11 p.m. on a Wednesday about a month ago, it dawned on me: In the jumble of extracting myself from the Bay Area, I forgot to download from my computer at work every single album I owned. My laptop at home was (and continues to be) an iTunes-incompatible dinosaur, so I stored all of my music at work.

This is one reason bootlegging is a bad idea. The only albums that show up in my iTunes library now are the ones I paid for.

At first, I was massively bummed. I realized that this was the reason I hadn’t listened to much music since I moved. Which is also, almost surely, a reason my emotions in general had hit a dead end. Happy things no longer made me happy. Sad things no longer made me sad. The only emotion that stayed intact was fear.

Slowly, though, I’ve warmed to the fact that 70 percent of my music was lost. Because so much of it was inextricably tied to people, places, memories, disasters from the past decade that I’d rather move on from. This allows me a fresh start. To create new neural pathways with new music. To start over, in yet another sense.

So I’ve been getting new albums here and there, listening to them at work. And when I discover an album I love, I no longer see ghosts. I see me.