Bookmark #369

Can a person be a song stuck in your head, an earworm? You’re all I have heard lately, in all songs I have heard lately. What a stroke of luck to find a tune so pleasant, so mellifluous! Once you find a song like that, if you find it at all, it’s all you hear. You hear it in the mundane moment at three in the afternoon when you’re sitting at a desk facing a screen as a mellow track wafts through the sunlit room. You hear it along with the coffee you get in the evening as the breeze whistles about the patio to gift you a few leaves, setting them softly on your table like a child carefully setting down a present made for you. You hear it in the unintelligible music, in the chaotic laughter of a drunken night when your wits are not about you, and your heart is pouring faster than the booze.

There’s only been one tune in my head for a while now. You’re the only song I feel like hearing lately. It’s the only song I can remember. I do not know what to make of it, but I do not mind it being this way.

You’ve stirred something in me, like how a good song stirs something in us as we catch a bit of it while walking around the city or sitting someplace doing nothing in particular. It’s a happy coincidence to hear just the part that grabs us as if every decision up until that moment led us to hear that little riff or chorus or just those two lines of lyric that were written as if only for us. Then, we listen to the song over and over again. It lights up something inside us we did not know existed until we first heard it, something that lay in corners we don’t visit or don’t know of in the first place. I can’t seem to put my finger on it—this unknown familiarity.

I don’t yet know what to make of it, I don’t know if I will know it, but you feel like a song I heard a long time ago, before I heard anything at all. It is all I have to say about it. For now, I only want to hear the music.

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