Bookends

That clean, crisp sound…piercing the darkness, as sharp as ever.

There is music, I think, for each of us…music that has followed along side of us since birth like a personal biographer. It was with us in our parent’s car, while we slept in the back seat; on the radio while we slaved away at our first shitty job as budding adults; and everywhere in between…popping up unexpectedly to say hello and add a few notes to the memoir.

During these exchanges, when change and fluctuation render us sensitive to the passage of time, and our own respective way points along that long dotted road, we are permitted to log our emotional state into that song, to perhaps be viewed again in the future. If, of course, we are fortunate enough to have a future, and hear the song again. The reason behind such a forward-thinking observation is self evident, for while we’re logging our current personality through the emotional connection, we are also allowed to view all the personalities that we have logged there along the way, in crystal clear perspective. Although the actual events that surround it may have been skewed by memory, like an old wooden plank in a humid room…constantly curling into itself, warping it’s backbone slowly over the course of the years…the essence of the bygone moment remains. For me, with this particular song, I am always running, and usually in the dark. Not quite the dark, but the glow, or the dim of some far-gone twilight. Through the corn fields under an unblemished moon and sky, or down a wet alley way under the whining street lights. Always running, but never tired. Exhaustion and despair know no place in times of change, and never will I suspect.

But each time that old tune drops in to converse, when I am in the mood to accept it’s full company, it always falls like a bookend to the first time I’ve heard it, with all the times in between arranged in almost a perfect chronological order. Each time may be the last, and in a way each time is the last…a quick look behind at that who we just were, only moments ago.