I don’t know who you are or whether we’ve met before, but I wanted to talk to you about music. I was walking the other day on the all-too-familiar streets when I found myself listening to the piano in my ears.
Nothing too snobbish, really, just some pieces of the piano playing. I couldn’t care less for the names. While some of it felt all-too-classical and made the streets feel like a slippery slope to pretentiousness, it was mostly grounded to my shallow depth.
You know me, I can pretend to be all deep and introspective. But in truth, I’m just a regular bloke who learned to watch people from afar. They tell you everything if you watch them from afar. It is when they’re close that they have the luxury to lie.
As the tracks played in my ears, I felt a sudden melancholy happiness, as ironic as that sounds, come from within me. I was cheery, but I was also despondent.
I’ve learned that just because some emotions don’t make sense in the language we use, doesn’t mean that they don’t exist. I believe when we face such feelings, we must go out of our way to invent new phrases instead of morphing our emotions into those we have handy.
In my experience, those are the only times we truly feel something; the times when we don’t have a word for how we feel is when we don’t jump to the shortcut of calling it something. We have to feel it thoroughly to feel it for the first time.
So, I felt it all, and I let it come. The traffic appeared to be moving at its own speed, but the piano made it go slower. I could hear the horns, the loud conversation, the cacophony, but it wasn’t jarring anymore. If anything, it made me smile.
The city was the piano, and I felt as if I was walking on its keys. Perhaps, that’s what music does, you know? It makes us create a reality of our own, and for me, I can’t not feel what I felt that evening whenever I walk in this city now.
That makes me wonder, though. Maybe I’ll never meet you in the same city, whoever you are. Perhaps, I’ll meet you in the same song someday. I guess, it’s a thought as good as any, and that’s a good place to meet as any. Yes, I’ll meet you in the same song someday.
I wonder, though, whether we’ve already met.