It's a musical meditation, y'all.

"Illusion never changed"

I am ripping through what I guess will be a memoir. Pages and pages. Handwritten notebook pages. Post-It pages. Grimoire pages. Google Docs. Word Docs. Notes App. Spotify?

While spread out on my friend’s living room floor and stylish coffee table, “Torn” by Natalie Imbruglia comes on my Spotify “recommended” once my original playlist ends. Instantly, I was given over to a 2013 Indianapolis production of the musical Hair where my soon-to-be dear friend, Anthony, playing Claud, would tell the story of how when he was a kid he used to say he was related to Natalie in hopes he would be bullied less. It was made up; much like Claud’s identity. Two visceral emotional responses to memory via music that traveled through multiple times. A connection made from something someone wrote years ago to someone who deeply bonded with it only then to have it embedded into someone else’s memory. That’s three waves of people spanning nearly three decades. All of this movement instills the multitude of meanings we each place on it with our own sorted memory.

Last week, walking down Broadway, past my beloved C-Town grocery, I got one of those cringy but comical notifications — the you-need-to-text-the-group-chat-immediately kind of notification. You know, the ones you thought you had silenced until the end of the digital age but alas you are slammed to the already broken concrete ground at 2:00 PM on a Tuesday because of some weird algorithm flaw. And what made this emotionally erratic episode more throat stopping, was the song that was on from my Hits of the 2000s playlist that complimented the situation so well. A little too well. Hence the immediate exacerbated flailing of arms and fingers to take and send the hilariously frustrating screenshot. A character from an early 2000s romcom could not have performed better in the middle of a busy city in their All Is Lost Era of the cinematic story arch. “How dare, haha,” was the quickest response back. In reality, this excited energy gave a little giggle on the sideway, leading to just shuffling home to become pressed over more pages. Pages where I will record my emotional response to this moment — how I got to this moment. How the songs on that playlist had me in a different timeline just a second before (that place was a middle school dance in a sweaty cafeteria). I make this note.

There’s always been discourse around the “soundtrack of our lives” but what? What if? What more? It feels like those little moments are spells or signs from the universe delivered via song. To give us this deep-seated emotional response, to help us remember. To keep the memory. To transmit that memory into a message for the now and beyond. All these past stories have transformed us into the beings we are now and should be carried forward in hooks and bars and recognizable melodies and delivered with sharp staccato voices reaching the ends of their range.

As a poet, we (the royal *we* here) are constantly scanning the world around us and trying to decipher its meaning. Oh, those living metaphors. And that’s the thing about working on writing a memoir as a poet, we are already hyper-aware of reading the tea leaves of life to best understand the pain of the past, present pleasures, and its future formations.

shuffle & sustain