It’s not that I’m a person who falls so easily in love – it’s that I recognize it the second I come across it. There’s no confusion, no waffling, no hesitation in leaping towards it, tackling it to the ground, pinning it down. Love, that confounding heart-mind-body-soul connection, it’s far too rare to let slip by.
It’s like this:
I move through life with the string of my heart vibrating at a particular frequency. A worker bee, I go from flower to flower, investigating. Some taste bitter, others, a neutral canola oil, bland and flavorless. Occasionally, I stumble across sweet nectar and I won’t prevaricate, when I do, I drink until I’m far past full and just a little dizzy, but nine times out of ten, that’s all that it is – sweet nectar. Delicious and saccharine, empty carbs I’ll burn through before night falls. A flicker, a brief moment in the sun.
But then, every once in a very long while, I’ll float by someone and like a distant echo, I’ll hear a frequency so close to my own that it lights up every neural connection in my brain.
The boy who slammed my locker door and scrunched up his face, the class clown. The girl who loved Walk Two Moonsjust as much as me, the sinuous best friend. The boy who smashed his face into an ice-cream cake to impress me, the manic pixie dream. The girl who spoke three languages and burned her finger on an espresso machine, the bright-eyed ingénue. The young man who cried to a vinyl record and was afraid of heights, the rugby ruffian. The young woman who pulled my tarot cards and commanded the world’s attention, the star femme. The young man who shuffled in caustic cracks and offhandedly seduced me into the void, the pied piper. The man who held my hand as I clambered back up to the surface and bought me strawberries, the chivalrous knight.
How lovely it was to collapse our chords together for a time. In our communion, in our disunion, in the distance between our vibrations, I bathed in so many different colors, learned many hard lessons, collected memories and stories to carry with me on the journey ahead. Perhaps, I thought, this was all there was. Harmonies. Nothing close to perfection, but oh, how beautiful the sound.
Well.
A few months ago, as I was minding my own business – in fact, just after I’d set my heart on hanging up the whole love business to handle other, far more pressing aspects of my life – a sound came to me, utterly unsolicited, rippling through the fabric of space and time, cutting through the atmosphere to cut right through my heart, and when it crashed into the string that hung there, I was stunned to find that this time, there was no dissonance. It was the same note. The same damn note. They’d told me that such a connection existed, but I hadn’t believed in it. When you fall in love eight times and the notes don’t match, why would you believe the ninth one would?
I won’t spoil the ending for you, but I think we all know what happens next (or do we?) – xoxo
Music Musings: UGH, T-Pain KILLS this cover, plus some Ariana and Lidia Solomon too.
Originally posted on LinkedIn.
