This is a story about how an album changed my life.
Now let me make something absolutely clear. I'm not a music person like some people I know are. I don't know discographies forward and backward, I can't recite the history of a band, and I usually don't even know the names of the members. I don't talk about my musical tastes because 1) I feel like I don't know enough to explain what music I like (what the hell determines which genre something is, anyway?) and 2) I don't want to be judged, sue me. All I know about music is that there are songs that make me feel very deeply. And that's good enough for me.
But then, this wasn't always the case. The first time I really started listening to music is when you said your favorite band was AFI. And because I liked you as a person, and I was probably already starting to fall for you, I went and I started a new Pandora station with AFI as the seed. So I got a mix of AFI, Rise Against, The Offspring, with a smattering of Incubus, Evanescence, and Red Hot Chili Peppers, among other things (like I said, I don't know genres, so I'm not going to try to explain in those terms). And it was weird and different for me, because I grew up with very traditional music in another language. But I warmed up to it, eventually. I grew to like it.
I woke up one morning with a song burning holes in my brain. It was chilling and it was beautiful and I knew I'd heard it but I couldn't remember the name. All that stuck with me was the beginning "Pull the top down, use your knees to drive." And just like that, I was hooked. I spent weeks listening to End Transmission on repeat. Something about it made me latch on. It appealed so fundamentally to a part of me I'm not sure I even knew existed at the time.
"If there's discretion that you've not abandoned, now's the time" became a motto of sorts, though ironically if anything, I did the opposite. I waited. I spent months waiting and I tried to make sure you didn't figure it out, because that wouldn't have been fair to you. And I spent as long as I could not saying anything to anyone, though it was like a shot to the chest when she asked if we were dating and left it at "no." But I waited, and I started listening all the way through Crash Love, and I waited some more, and every time you made it clear you weren't interested (intentionally or not), it hurt a little more.
Then I turned to Okay, I Feel Better Now. And I let the music wash over me like waves. It was my therapy, my escape. It was better than trying to explain how I felt. And even a year later, even though everything was different, I still turned to music every time it hurt. I had a lot of coping strategies back then. I tried many different things to get the aching to stop. And sometimes it did, and sometimes it didn't, and some habits were better and some habits were worse. I found some demons in those years that I still bump into sometimes. But I also found music. I don't know where I would have wound up if I hadn't found a way to deal with it. I don't think it would have been good.
The thing about music is that it didn't make me pretend, it didn't make me ignore it. It let me accept the pain as a part of me without letting it destroy me. There are still mornings when I wake up and don't know how to deal with a day normally, functionally. But it's not as bad anymore. My demons don't have the same power to hurt me anymore. It doesn't really matter, but that's alright.
They won't leave until I'm gone. I'm gone.
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