A year ago today, I received an email from a friend. Wanting some sort of far-flung connection in the midst of an acute crisis that had made the world feel small, I had reached out to explain that my partner and I were listening to a lot of music together down prison phone lines – some of which he’d made – in order to ground ourselves, process emotions, and navigate a nightmare.
He wrote back with an anecdote. He had recently been talking to a friend, he said:
who confessed to me that he will often listen to one thing until its burned into his memory as a sort of “save point”… I asked him why that is — and he said, he’s not sure, but just in case he needs to go back and have another “look around”, it’s there for him. It occurs to me that a lot of listening may be this way. Music as a testament. Just keep listening together and praying together in any way prayer comes to you – I’ve found it to be a huge solace in my life.
I have thought about this often over the year since.
We listened and prayed together for months on end. Music remained a testament as we revisited various “save points” together that were not only markers for lives lived but lives to come again. It was cathartic, helping to channel joy and unleash pain. I later wrote about it, wanting to provide my own testament to the hope music was continuing to provide us with. It helped.
One year on, I still listen to my “save point” occasionally. Twikipedia’s “room for one” was a song I turned to automatically on my many cross-country train rides, during which hope was precious and love a powerful motor. They were one of many bands my partner had introduced me to, and the songs melancholic propulsion kept me moving forwards whenever I thought I might be better off keeling over and staying still.
I listened to a lot of other music at that time, but “room for one” is the song that transports me back to last September effortlessly. It is less a testament, however, and more a marker of distance. I don’t play it to take another look around a place unchanged, but to feel its new neutrality. Within it, I sense the edges of an emotional state no longer familiar. I smell last year’s winter air. I feel the exhaustion that became a false friend. I hear it all as if from a great distance. I sense that the ears now listening are not the same as those that listened before. There is still a sense of return, but to a house I have not lived in for some time. The song is not inhabited as it once was.
This week, I have been listening to “Tombstone Poetry” by Field Medic a lot. He is new to me – we were introduced via a playlist selected by one of my new flatmates as we ate dinner together over the weekend. It snagged something in me.
I think the guitar part is beautiful. Discarding the lyrics, I set about learning to play it for myself. It is tricky and I have yet to master it, but I practice it compulsively, driven by an irrational belief that it will provide some much-needed release, if only I could play it perfectly.
The song is not a save point – not yet. It is a vessel. I pour everything I have into it and hope that it might contain a discomfort and despair that I never have to come back to when the task is completed. As someone who has written about grief and change for a decade, I know this is a fool’s errand, but I do it anyway. It is the only way I know how to deal with grief.
The neurosis of writing, crafting, creating – for me at least – arises from the illusion that completing ‘the thing’ will put all turbulent emotion to rest. It is not only a creative motor but a self-flagellating one. I talk incessantly, circling the same confusions, driving my friends up the wall for thinking that the right words in the right order will turn the world back right side up. But it never does. More often than not, I end up talking too much but saying nothing.
I externalise my inner turmoil. I get outside of it. It looks back at me. It is ugly.
Life tastes most bitter when it is teaching you a lesson. I come to appreciate that pouring everything you have into something is no recipe for reward or longevity. Sometimes, over-watering something leaves you in a drought and the thing watered is too drowned to grow.
I do not regret this way of living – a life lived by half measures would be far less interesting – but the familiar pain of disappointment hits every time as if for the first time. I wish it was not felt so sharply, but the pain is also a testament to the enormity of a love freely given. Unrequited, it frays the soul. If only life’s loose ends were so easily knotted by the right narrative.
What hurts is the patience required for the pain to pass. I cannot bear to delete the save points, and the vessels and vases start to make life crowded. Heartbreak enters like a bull in a china shop. A love lived through music is all the more complicated. Whole back catalogues become irradiated zones. Is it best to quarantine everything? Or allow oneself to mutate whilst living alongside their atomic hum?
I pick up my guitar again, but it doesn’t help. Neither does this deposit on the web – there are twenty years of cracked and dusted vessels here already. Sleep might bring relief, but dreams are vessels of their own and there is no predicting those. I resign myself to the fact that there is nothing to put down that might lighten the load. Only time brings difference, and sad songs bring too slow a tempo.