Leo looked at his phone. He hadn't texted Mike in three years. Sarah was married in another time zone.

He hit play on the first track. The tinny, synthesized beat of a forgotten dance-pop anthem filled his modern, quiet apartment. Suddenly, he wasn't sitting in a designer chair; he was nineteen again, his skin stinging from a mild sunburn, sitting on a jagged pier in New Jersey.

The archive didn't contain what a stranger might expect. Instead, it was a compressed folder of 128kbps MP3s—the soundtrack to the summer of 2010. As the files extracted, a wave of nostalgia hit him harder than the actual ocean ever had.

The folder held more than music. Buried at the bottom was a text file titled READ_ME_TRIP_NOTES.txt .