When I wake up on the wrong side of the bed, I feel tempted to brush my teeth on the wrong side of the sink, get dressed on the wrong side of my dorm room and exit on the wrong side of the door. I am tempted, when cranky, to become gloomy, and then inconsolable. Sadness is seductive. It is comforting to embrace this spiral rather than fight my way back to normal.

Somewhere, in an alternate universe, there is a Ribka who really did spend the rest of her life in jail for escalating someone’s side-eye into a beat-down. I have surely wasted past lives this way. In this life, my repeated offense is turning on miserable albums when I am already feeling poorly.

When I turn on my favorite albums, I know they will make me feel much worse. This downward spiral has not been prophesied. There is no great force pulling my finger to the play button, but I press it anyway, and when it ruins me, I hit rewind and play again.

With my limited survival instinct, I promised myself that I wouldn’t dare come near Phoebe Bridgers’ “Lost Weekend” album upon its August release. In the past, any morning that has touched her songs has doomed its remaining hours. In other words, I have doomed my remaining hours every time I scroll through my phone to turn on one of her songs.

Of course, since the album’s release, I have streamed it so frequently I could recite each song in its entirety, backwards, with fifty beers under my belt, fifty years from now. “Lost Weekend” is home to some of my new favorite songs in Bridgers’ discography. She’s retained her title as world’s best mind reader, and spilled my mind’s contents to the whole world. Maybe she needs to compensate me for the success of “The Governor’s Waltz” – I did that dance! I invented it! The memories these songs evoke in me are gut-wrenching.

I’ve been developing a theory for quite some time that when she wrote “Stranger in The Alps,” she was observing me through my middle school’s security cameras and reporting on my winter hibernations. The feeling of being cut open and exposed by lyrics is a strange addiction. I fall for metaphors in music, and I’m still on the hunt for a musician who can match her talent with songs that are joyful rather than painful.

For some pain relief, I’m working on putting distance between me and Phoebe. For now, I have tried to ban the album from my walks to my morning classes. Instead, I have tainted my Spotify Wrapped by looping Disney songs. I listen to recitals of joyful poems, and I mumble the words as I pick a seat in lecture. I try to soak up sunlight before winter sneaks into this fall.

I still hope that Phoebe Bridgers will one day release songs that don’t make me ache from the inside out. I miss being in awe of her language, but I am on the lookout for new musical obsessions. Swept up in the cheerful tunes of artists I’m a little embarrassed to name, I keep accidentally smiling at strangers when I pass them on campus. But they do smile back on purpose.