Impossible Not To
May 9, 2017
The thing about missing something is that it always sneaks up on you. Parking lots in the rain. Vanilla lattes gone cold from talking. That one song better accustomed to summer windows, rolled down with the sunlight bright on your teeth, breeze curving around the melody like an arm around a waist.
The music is always there. It lingers in my head whenever I watch someone run past, two legs healthy, breath pounding. When I see a Jetta. When I’m walking home from class on a spring day, and it’s the only thought I can bear. Stare at the ground in front of me. Heartbeat soft, not a cloud in the sky. Inhale.
It comes wrapped up in everything—in the humid warmth of down-south Augusts, in the smell of shade-soaked trails and red t-shirts and bowling and movies I never had a chance to watch. Gingerbread houses, misunderstood. Frozen yogurt and awkward customer service interactions. It comes packaged neatly into favorite books and cheese pizza boxes, folded gently into pancakes topped with strawberries and whipped cream, tucked into handfuls of chocolate chips, saved for the worst times.
Most days I can sit down at my desk, open my computer, start my homework. With other voices around me, I am calmer. Thoughts of stargazing can usually be chased away by the light. On those days, there’s music only in my fingertips. It’s soft classical, maybe Pachelbel. (I play it on repeat as I write these words. It’s never as happy as I used to find it.) When it’s quiet, the sound is easier to forget. I imagine it as I do the treads of sneakers on the inside lane of a track, arms uncarried, shoulders low, eyes fixed on the finish. I imagine it as the final curve of that fourth lap, absolutely flying. I imagine it as if I am on the edge of the straightaway, every part of me reaching. Like in those dreams where you’re trying to do something and you never quite can. Yeah. Something like that.
Other days, though. Other days I am struck unexpectedly, everything silent except for the music. I listen for the lyrics I learned first. I try to remember when I did—seems like years ago now, the bass rattling my car down to its bones, the evening spilling into the earth. I find myself mesmerized by the way a laugh can move through someone’s body, shaking them from the inside out, so contagious, so irresistible. I keep a piece of your handwritten harmony under my pillow. It’s only in the times when the music gets too loud that I pull it out. Doesn’t really help, but I like to think it will.
I wish I could turn it off. Then again, I don’t.
The thing about missing something is that a part of me will always carry it. The music. And with it sweaters and warm flannel shirts and picnic dreams. Drifting through garden back entrances, squeezing my hand under donut-shop tables, tucking my hair back lightly. There when I least expect it. But everywhere. Everywhere I go, the music somehow follows.
I know every word.
Header image courtesy of YouTube
