Ryan Beatty – "Phantom"

Nobody warns you how bad some people are at disappearing.

They can be completely out of your life and still somehow have terrible boundaries. Their name turns up somewhere it has no business being. You walk into a place you went together and suddenly they're there too. A song comes on and congratulations, you've booked a table for two. You can delete the texts, unfollow the account and remove every reasonable point of contact. Your brain has other plans.

Ryan Beatty understands the problem. On “Phantom,” the person is gone, but their absence has become its own kind of presence. He keeps running into the memory of them in places where memory wasn't invited, and his delivery makes the whole thing sound less dramatic than annoyingly unavoidable. That's important. Heartbreak isn't always crying on the kitchen floor. Sometimes you're having a perfectly decent Wednesday and a person who no longer exists in your daily life manages to ruin a few minutes of it.

Beatty doesn't fight particularly hard against the feeling, either. He lets “Phantom” live in that strange period after a relationship when you've done everything you're technically supposed to do, but your surroundings haven't gotten the memo. The intimacy is gone. The evidence is everywhere.

That's probably the cruelest trick a memory can pull. You don't even need to miss someone for them to keep showing up. They just know all your favorite places.