Let It Ring Some More

How easily music can bowl me over.

Years later, and I still remember that December night on 28th and Lex. When the world crashed down on me and I sat on the cold, dirty floor of the terrace, crying for hours and listening to Staind and Nirvana on repeat. How my entire body shook but my lips still mouthed the words, because they were the only thing keeping me attached to reality.

How years of moving between America and Sweden always ended up being about the music. That my tastes didn't belong anywhere, and, subsequently, neither did I. How many nights were spent on the floor, with my sad excuse for a CD player, wishing I was a thousand miles away, and how that song just reminded me of it.

I remember being very young and having just fallen in love with Mozart. I'd pick up the turntable needle, carefully, and move it back one track; every time raising the volume a little more, until finally, the aria would vibrate through my fingers and make my heart explode. I thought I had never felt anything more beautiful, until my teenage heart sank deep into choral notes and Togetherness. As I stood in the midst of a hundred others, my very spine shivered; I thought perhaps life would overwhelm me until I could take no more. Perhaps music agitated the adolescent tendency to dramatize; perhaps music is what saved me.

And then all that damned New York music. Sitting in my first apartment in Gothenburg, 19 and already world-weary, 19 and already tired of the stability, listening to Ryan Adams and dreaming that one day I would be there, too. Sitting in my last apartment in Gothenburg, 24 and fearing my adventure was over, 24 and thinking I'd never have New York again and Regina was just a reminder of what I'd lost. How the very same songs made me giggle three years later, back on Manhattan soil and home.

Sometimes I still think I won't make it. I who am this cynical, rational person and not easily swayed. If I allow myself to crank the music up too loud... I fear I will be swept away for good. I suspect I might not even mind.