There are two stacks of CDs on top of my player. Huge, glaring, ugly stacks, consisting of every disc I’ve listened to since the beginning of the school year. “File us away,” they silently say to me — but I can’t, because once I start cleaning up my CDs, I’ll know the end is near. There’s some history in the piles of discs that I don’t feel ready to face quite yet. Somewhere in between Springsteen’s “Live 1975-1985” and Miles Davis’ “Kind of Blue” is Nozmo King’s “Beyond This Point,” the second CD from the first Ithaca College band I ever saw play at Key West.

Under the Disco Biscuit’s “They Missed the Perfume” and on top of Incubus’s “S.C.I.E.N.C.E.” is G(25)’s first record, a Park-produced masterpiece that inspired me to find some space in The Ithacan to print my first-ever band interview. It was a stylized piece about the band’s incredible electronic-hardcore music and their overwhelming obsession with Indian food. At the top of the second pile is Wingnut’s “Color,” a great disc by the band I wrote my inaugural “Live Music” feature about two years ago.

Dismantling the dual leaning towers of music is so difficult because these discs are about more than the music that’s encoded on them. They’re about my four years in Ithaca, my four years writing for The Ithacan, and — when they inevitably do end up back in their cases or booklet spots — they’ll be about my past. It’s a past that is rapidly in danger of becoming a memory, a memory filled with eighth-note licks and unexpected drum breaks, saxophones, harmonicas and harmonies. It’ll be a memory packed with hazy, freezing evenings on the docks, late nights with an acoustic guitar on my lap, and beautifully dingy basements filled to the brim with sweaty bodies, minor chords and major vibes.

What I think I’ll remember most, though, isn’t specific shows or bands or instruments. I’ll think back on the past four years and remember sitting here at my computer, trying to make sense of what I’d just seen, trying to tell you, whoever you are, about what was making my butt shake or my mind race, trying to find the words and put them on paper before they were lost forever.

I think, really, I was trying to find the way to tell you what made dancing on a dirty floor at some hole-in-the wall college town club seem like the best thing in the world. I don’t think I ever did that; I really don’t think I ever understood it myself. I thought it could have been many things: the incredibly diverse people in this town, the way the two hills converge on the valley, creating an intimate, protected community, the sheer number of willing instrumental experimenters and part-time butt-shakers. I’m pretty sure, though, that it always came down to just one thing — the music.

I know this — I may eventually organize my discs as mementos to take home with me, but the music’s not going anywhere.

It’ll stay here, for the next freshman with an acoustic guitar, a laptop and a love of music to discover for themselves, in whatever form it takes — country, funk, rock, electronica, or (and this is more likely) some unheard amalgam of all of those styles. Ithaca’s music is in a constant state of transition, and that’s really what makes it so exciting. With every group of people that leave this town every summer comes a new group in the fall — new musicians, new writers, new instruments and new ideas.

Drop me a line once in a while and let me know what I’m missing.