Sometimes I realize that music is the manner in which we measure the human souls around us. Sometimes I forget. Every word and lyric can bring on a really specific moment in life. (Glorious moments or the worst decisions ever made.) It speaks volumes about friends, family, emotions we could never even dream to bring into reality. It even teaches us about ourselves.
Music is sometimes that slap of fresh air that brings life back into a set of lungs that were fighting to breathe. Unaware that you were actually suffocating until you hear the melody of a specific song and the day just seems to brighten, almost instantly like one of those cliche epiphany cinematic moments.
Everything is suddenly better.
Music is soul food. There will always be that one song that recalls: the endless nights with trembling, muscular spasms, skin on fire, while sitting in a tub of ice water trying to relax. Those chest heaving moments where all you can do to keep your head from exploding and spilling brain matter everywhere is to grip it tight. The moments where you realize your hair is falling out faster than you'd like it too. When it feels like you have invisible ants crawling inside your skin. The only thing that can be done is to sit and stare blankly at the faucet, where your mind is screaming for scorching hot water, but your body says don't move.
Music can help me escape the moment, it can take me to my mental paradise. The moment in my life I decided I would exist forever that only people who know the real me, knows that I exist. Back to a school cafeteria with rows upon rows of crappy tables and unbalanced chairs. Chairs that we can all admit gave us all early onset lower back pain. It can take me back to that silver sky on a chilly fall morning. Where the sun streamed in through a window just slightly escaping the blanket of clouds.
It would smell like French toast and maple syrup. Every trauma and fear would melt off slowly as I would take my seat next someone I spent most of my mornings with. His eyes would be closed, headphones in, black hoodie with the hood over his head. Nothing could destroy this moment - and I would just feel every layer I hate about myself melt and fall off. The streams of people that entered the building how they would waltz in swarms of uniformed colors. The presence beside me would open his eyes soon and greet me, and I would remember to breathe.
Anything can be achieved, it'll be a struggle. You'll want to give up. You'll bleed. Scream. Cry. Hate. Love. Forget. Heal.
Breathe.
Music can bring back that moment. It does sometimes, and the pain is unbearable. My paradise comes at a cost, when I visit it I'm usually on the verge of death. It can make me forget to breathe and then punch me in the stomach so hard that I have no choice but to breathe. Even when I don't want to breathe, when I honestly want to forget how. I breathe, it's almost like fighting God himself but knowing there's no way I'd ever win. It stings more than anything, knowing that this paradise I made, can only be seen in absolute darkness.
The sort of darkness that destroys and consumes souls and leaves physical markings on your flesh. It's like looking up at the night sky but realizing every star that used to glitter back at you virtually disappeared. Music makes them come back though. They show dimly lit, and polished so much they glow in low light. The little fragments of scattered reasons to keep breathing.
Those reasons to live, are found by song title, and classified by lyric. And they'll glitter faintly forever in the recess of the darkest parts of my mind. Ready to invoke my paradise when my body feels like giving out, and when my mind is on the verge of exploding.
There's no escaping what music does. There's also no denying that music is alive.
And it keeps us alive.
