Monday, January 5, 2009

Blank CD

Gee wiz, a guy sure knows how to chastise a girl's heart if the first track on a cd is the beautifully written "Claire de Lune" by Claude Debussy, the third movement of his piano suite. I was paralyzed by the first chord of this song as it idly played on my iTunes. I found my lungs and stomach in a fit of knots when I realized why this song was on this record. I'll write without sensory. I didn't want to see him, as I hadn't the previous 3 weeks. Or four, for that matter. I told him to leave it on the door step. This, seemingly "innocent" present that he was delivering was one of the most unnerving ways of getting back at me. With good reason. I didn't want to listen to it so I tossed it indolently at the coffee table hoping, by god hoping, that it would grow itself a pair of legs and walk its way to the garbage can. I promised myself to maintain an unsurmountable charisma so when the time was right; I could play the contents of the cd without a feeling of guilt or worse, sadness. Music is undoubtedly the most spectacular part of our civilization. The way we can connect a feeling, memory, smell, moment, to one song. Close your eyes and listen to that song that had you at the paramount time of your life. Euphoria is a scandalous thing. Closing my eyes now, I long to walk along the miles and miles of hedges that grow so freely in the outskirts of Oxford. Some might recall the scene in The Gladiator with Russell Crowe, as he walks to his wife and child, hands stretched in a moment of digression. Touching, ever so lightly on the fields of wheat that welcomed him home...only to realize it was a walk to the impending realization that his family had died. But what I see is luscious, juvenile green, fertile land. A place where the most lethargic cow wouldn't be reprimanded for enjoying the beauty of one blade of grass, even after consumption.

I didn't know I would be thinking differently about such irrevocable feelings. But it happens, and you'll forgive me as soon as you hear the song that made you see the beauty in someone so engaging, you can't help but reminisce the past.
The Past. It starts and ends. A second a head, a minute behind.

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