I have always wished I could write music. It’s like another language I can’t speak. I sit down sometimes when I’m bored and I’ll scribble half a set of lyrics on whatever scrap paper I can find and at first it will sound good and slowly it will become worthless and meaningless and I’ll remember I don’t have the musical capacity to write a good melody for it anyway and so I’ll staple it to my ceiling or throw it away, and that is my short lived experience as a musician.
My mom says that when I used to play piano, I could really play. My parents say I was good. My parents also believe I could have gone to stanford or that I could be be the leader of the free world some day so that’s not really a good measure of anything, but I think I was alright. The problem was that I knew some people who were musically phenomenal, and I have a hard time continuing to do things when I’m aware that I’m not very good at them.
I wish I had never quit trying to learn, but I could feel that it was something I could never really understand. There has always been a barrier between myself and really, truly understanding music in the way that someone who can really, truly play music does. I recognized that when I would watch some of my friends play. They were a part of the music in a way I never really was, and it didn’t feel like a place I would ever belong.
So I found other languages. I started taking photo classes and I realized that I could see the world through a lens in a way that other people couldn’t. In some weird way I felt like people who can really, truly play music feel and understand that music in the same way I can feel and understand images when I’m taking them. Sometimes I can feel that slipping away too though, I can feel the neural pathways being pruned and when I hold a camera I have to think before I shoot, which was never the case before.
I hate that time takes things from you like that. There’s only enough space in your life for the things you can do every day, or for the people you see very often. We lose parts of ourselves and parts of our pasts as quickly as we forget the words we learned to say in foreign languages when we were children. I don’t like losing things like that. I don’t like digging through old boxes of letters and birthday cards and finding thrice folded up sheets of wide lined notebook paper scrawled over with half finished songs and wonder why I find it so hard to put a melody to my feelings now.
When I was eight I used to ride my bike in circles on the driveway and sing about things I wished would happen, like my friends moving in across the street from me or waking up and being able to fly. I don’t sing my own made up songs anymore, and I don’t wish I could fly. I mean that would be cool, but there’s sort of a hierarchy of wishes, if you know what I mean. Before I can wish to fly or wish to time travel I have to start with the simpler things. I’ll wish to wake up feeling okay, to find patience in between the places where I see other people and they help hold me together. I’ll wish to stop feeling let down, to be “mindful” as Addie used to say and keep my head above it all.
I’m eighteen now, and I never learned to play the violin. I say that I wish I had learned because I think it would help me destress. You say playing music isn’t something you do to destress. I never said it was. I wish I would stop sharing myself with people because I don’t understand 99% of the things I give away, and before I can make sense of them myself someone else interprets them for me.
Maybe you don’t play music to destress, but I would. Maybe you don’t shuffle your song library and listen to Jóhann Jóhannsson and Frank Ocean consecutively, and maybe you can leave a conversation unfinished and not feel bothered by words hanging in the air, and maybe we just speak different languages and I have not yet learned how to stop the words from getting lost in translation.
I could never glide my fingers across a keyboard and feel a wave behind me, because music is not my language. I could never speak it, but I understand. You say if someone has a trained ear, they would hear it. I don’t need trained ears to listen. In the same way I understand my brother as he rattles away in Spanish at the dinner table, a language I have never learned, I can understand emotions conveyed through notes. I can understand silence from hundreds of miles away, and I can tell when a piece leaves no room for harmony.
Plain, simple words will always be my language of choice. I use too many of them for my writing to ever be elegantly beautiful, but it’s because I’m always trying to say precisely what I mean. What we say to each other matters to me. The conversations I exchange with other people, in whatever language; I really, really care about them. I am starting to understand that this is not always mutual.
Maybe the next time someone is really, truly trying to say something to me, I won’t jump to share every thought I could give on the matter. When words go running through my mind I’ll shoot them down. I’ll stop trying to speak languages that are not mine, in the hope that I could somehow learn. When you give me your ideas, and when you are the one overflowing with words in any language, I’ll keep it simple;
“yeah that’s interesting”