There is one album that is very special to me. It doesn't matter what
it is. But whenever I play it on my pro audio equipment or on my home
audio system it all comes back to me, feeling the love and desire while I
first played one of the songs on my guitar for my first love, then the
soft longing I had in her absence when we parted for the summer, the
confidence that we would see each other again soon and resume our
happiness, then months later the disillusionment I felt while driving
through the shrubby brown hills of West Texas on my way back to school
and the understanding that maybe she and I weren't meant to be together,
and worse, that everything we had lived together before was just
passing the time, and that isn't that what life is - a giant collection
of moments we have to pass as peacefully and blissfully as possible -
and then the later memories, of how I played the album and that song
again and again months and years later, after the pain had worn off, and
those very feelings I first enjoyed became suffused in nostalgia with
the richness of time.
And today, being able to reflect on all those feelings I no longer
even feel them when I play the album on my home audio system, but rather
a collection of them tied to the album itself, so that it's the memory
of the album holding good memories that I find enjoyable when I'm not
actually listening to the deliciously beautiful and melodic songs. The
album's a little more than half an hour long and yet ironically it holds
years of my life, which ordinarily I don't have access to in anything
more than flashes and bursts of memories, little snatches of images of
her face, and looking out on the road, and feeling sweetly melancholy
and alone, and all the realizations from that period of my life being
truer than anything I've ever known since.
All that from a single album played off a home audio system. I'm
almost afraid that the more I listen to it, the more present memories
I'll imbue it with, which will cancel out the old ones, and so I'm
reticent to listen to it on repeat the way I used to while I first
explored the intricacies of its steel guitar and syncopated cowbell.
No comments:
Post a Comment