It has always been there for me. I have the soundtrack of my life beginning with the 60s rock and folk my parent played repeatedly throughout my childhood. I have the nights my parents had parties and my mom played her guitar and we all sang songs. Music has always healed me and, at times, been my escape. Lots of times actually.
Music has really been the vehicle I used to change my moods, my healing, my self esteem, my goals and dreams. Music has provided me escape from reality and at the very same time, better access to reality than anything else I can think of. Music is woven into the most intimate parts of my life and so there really is a soundtrack to my life.
Certain songs bring about the demise of relationships. Each man I have loved significantly has his own playlist of songs that were part of who we were, who we became and how we ended. And if I go back and listen to that playlist, I am returned again to the highs and lows and everything in between. It is the music, the songs, the lyrics that grant me access to the relationships past while also granting me new vistas on ancient history.
I wouldn’t be who I am without music. I wish I understood it better, to me it is just this magical talent that only certain people are bestowed. I have zero musical talent but I think I have more than made up for it in my appreciation, worship and purchase of other’s music. I cannot tell you how much time, money, energy and emotion I have spent on musical endeavors.
My dear friendship with Alan, who is no longer with us, was born out of a mutual love and respect for music. We attended concerts and shows together. Each of us getting something we lacked from the people on stage belting out the tune. For him, it was about the song, for me about the words. Together we appreciated the whole event thoroughly.
I use music to bring me up when I am down and down when I need access to emotions I would rather not feel. I have always had a dark and stormy heart. I am totally smitten with a sad, twisted, dark love songs. Songs about death and loss and heartbreak and mental illness and addictino. A poet’s heart resides with in me and beats in time to long ballads with tales of loss and woe and heartbreak and redemption unclaimed. I have loved the song “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” since I was like 4. Something so captivating about the lives lost, the promise unfulfilled and the beauty that beats with every drum and heart beat. There is something beautiful in loss...
I believe I love the musical sadness so much because to love something fully is to also to grieve it. I only grieve the things I love deeply. I have written about this before...many times over. Great love begets great grief and I have loved many people, things, men, children, pets and other not so animate objects in this life: ideas, causes (lost and found), and places. I have loved greatly in my life and so too have I grieved. And music has been there the entire time to provide me a soundtrack and in so doing grants me access to the entirety of my past. All I have to do is turn it on, turn it up and I am there.
Music has healed me in so many ways, so many times. I am grateful to be alive but I am most grateful for the songs that have walked me through the madness, the despair, the loss, the heartbreak and the comeback from each and every one of those things. And that when I bereft of solution or peace, I can always increase the volume and escape.
Again.
Still.
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