This I Believe

”If this was one of those songs of purloined love and painted faces, you could let distance sketch a smile on your face. Cheap irony. You won’t get away that easy here.”

I believe in the magic of music, and the way words can save a soul. Rhythms and beats, mesmerizing and beautiful; allowing us to fall in love and equally in hate. Every emotion is spawned by a harmony, or the lack of one. Every dissonance, every note echoes dutifully in our ears, hanging heavy in the air. Close your eyes for a second, for just a moment, as to let the sounds over come you and wash everything away. All your regrets, all your fears, happiness and joy, slipping away into an absolute numbness.

Make a beat and it’s easier to remember, all the these things that plague our minds, unfortunately, far to often, we wish to simply forget. These things they sing to us, so just let the melody watch over you, and pray that you don’t wake the same person tomorrow. Our lives are controlled by a force unknown, biorhythms and religions, all we do is try to explain it all away. Open your arms and close your eyes, embrace your sorrows, laugh in the face of your anger and fall in love with hate.

Imagine for just one second, a girl of just ten years, leaning over a fence post, lost in her own little world. A world filled with hatred – as it is second nature to hate what you can’t understand, and life, I could never understand, and besides, what love did I have to give anyway? Even at such a tender age, I was at a loss to grasp what emotions were, and how to express them. Until I found the beauty of a word, and the way that I could spin them, to mean exactly what I wanted them to mean. Such a sense of power, such a sense of control, everything I’d been lacking.

Watch her grow to thirteen, grinning as she spits blood on concrete, a growing love of skin against skin, as long as no one got their teeth knocked out. A price we were willing to pay, as long as it meant venting. Besides, we were friends, we couldn’t actually hurt each other, it was good practice for those just in case times. For me, the joy of a word was lost, warped into a twisted sense of masochism and sadism, just a relief. One many pay a price for, and lucky we never did, other than a slightly shattered friendship.

Short fingers grasp blindly at the metal, bringing it up to cold lips, anger fueling a song of short notes and truncated phrasings, lacking of the things I’ve always been told makes a musical piece, but who was I to care? Held sticks and played flams and diddles till you couldn’t tell the difference, because the sound itself was soothing, mallets to a pad or to the edge of a fence, it didn’t matter, just another escape. Sweet escape, something that I could only found in the movement of a pen or the hum of music bouncing off the walls.

Words soothed coarse emotions, sanded down rough edges when I wasn’t sure what I felt about things. Allowed me to disappear into a world where you could attend your own funeral or speak to the heavens and actually receive a reply, kiss despair on the lips and laugh at the devil’s coercion.