music

In my mind, music and fall and the past are all the same. Music, because I must have first heard it sometime in the fall, a September birthday, and since then it is as powerful to me as a time machine, transporting me to moments in my past I thought I’d forgotten. Fall, because each September I have the chance to reflect on another year lived, another year full of moments stained in my mind by new songs.

Music, to me, acts as the ultimate sense, blending together sound and sight, taste and smell and touch. Working these senses on my soul.

The recent past:

Yesterday, stumbling in my “backyard”—a live concert outdoors. The scene: a live cover of “Like a Rolling Stone,” acoustic strings, hollowed wood, calloused strums. Wind and sun panes in haphazard patterns on my skin, the scent of fair food and fall and football and the taste of love and youth and longing. And in one scene: leaves falling to remind me of the upcoming season, hands held, barefeet, shadows…. Transitions in motion.

In retrospect, each of my life transitions happened in songs. Each time I hear “Wide Open Spaces” I remember open roads, Indiana corn, the smell of grass and the feel of sun melting in my ear. Learning that life must be lived freely because at some point it ends.

“Springsteen” will always remind me of college and thinking I held the world in my hand, open windows and endless nights and sneaking onto the baseball field just to feel immortal, how taking a risk can do that—make you immortal for one brief second.

And every time “Crazy Love” plays I'll remember lying on a deck over an ocean littered by stars, in a moment in my life when I realized love exists in ways I never expected. It exists in uncertainties and in chances - it isn't simple like I thought. It exists in the opening and closing of doors, in the way some people come in and out of your life so unexpectedly, and it exists in the way some people just leave with songs to remember them by.

There are more—songs I carry in my heart, songs I can’t share with the world because sometimes the transitions are too painful to remember. You know them—the songs that leave you with still unanswered questions—those are the kinds that tug at me the most. The songs that keep finding their way into your life, like some people keep finding their way into your life, when you think they’ve already transitioned out. The songs that you don’t expect to still be so strong, making you question your past and ten falls ago. The songs you still want to hold onto, but not knowing if you can anymore. Wishing you had the courage to ask the meaning behind the lyrics.

But then there are the promises of new songs, songs that will mark sweet transitions, songs that perhaps-yes-are part of your past and will reemerge and blend into a scene where guitar strings and calloused fingers and hollowed wood remind you that time is only in our minds, and this thing we call life is still strumming along.