Inner ear

The hazy morn­ing sun is shin­ing in my eyes. I’m trav­el­ling in my sealed cocoon, cut off from the noise around me. My head­phones are pressed tightly into my ears, sub­mer­ging me in the sweetest music. My head is filled with the singer’s words — his every breath as clear as crys­tal, every cracked note and frail break in his voice almost too much to bear. His fin­gers scratch beau­ti­ful arpeg­gios from his battered old acous­tic gui­tar — the gui­tar on which the var­nish was slowly being rubbed off the back of the neck, the gui­tar with the thread­bare strap. I listen to these songs, remem­ber­ing how they moved me when I first heard them — a rainy autumn night a few years ago, myself and a hand­ful of other people in a friend’s living-room. Whatever happened to some of those people? The words he sings make more sense to me now than they did back then, and it sad­dens me that I now under­stand his lyr­ical con­cerns almost too well. While some things have become clearer, a great deal else has become far more con­fus­ing. I can’t pre­tend to under­stand everything, even though I’m sup­posed to be older and there­fore wiser.

I want to keep listen­ing, just for a few minutes more. Maybe I missed some­thing in his words, and all will sud­denly be revealed in a blind­ing flash of light if I remain in my sound cocoon, In here, I don’t have to think of any­body or any­thing else — it’s just me and the music.