Marooned at the sea wall all day, we would make our way through a collection of mixtapes, one side at a time. There would always be the songs, and the tournament days were long but the summers were short.
The songs themselves become fixtures, chapters in time to revisit again as a soundtrack in a small tape deck.
The mixtapes were replaced by a five-disc changer, set to random.
An iPod begat the disc changer.
And now the iPod and playlist sat in the cloud of Spotify — intangible, an infinite variety of songs played us through until the sunset, never repeating, and a familiarity despite never returning back again to those old chapters of song.