Clair De Lune

I fell in love with you a hundred ways the night I lay under the grand piano while you played “Clair de Lune” with such passion that I ceased to exist. I sprawled out on the cool hardwood of the auditorium with the goliath Steinway above me and closed my eyes until there was only you and me and Debussy, raised from his grave by your infinite grace. Everything you played, every piece you touched was laced with magic. You came from a background with less theory and fewer lessons and substantially less privilege, and yet your instinct was always so much more astute, so much more natural than the rest of us. So when we found ourselves alone in the music building at midnight on a Saturday and you acquiesced to play for an audience of one, I fell hypnotically into a place unreachable in the tediousness of adult existence.

I have been thinking a lot about the fading of music from adult life. Jessica and I used to simultaneously stream loud music from the speakers hooked up on our desks and share music as though it was as essential as sleep. We burned CDs and pursued new artists with fervent devotion. In my last year at LC, I checked out thousands of classical works from the library in order to burn them, driven by a rampant fear that I would miss some great note and in its absence, lose some essential lesson, some universal truth that would leave my world inexorably altered.

It takes real effort now, to close my eyes and exist only in the melody and harmony and juxtaposition of sound. One of my earliest memories is lying on rough, shag carpet with tears running down my cheeks as I heard Vivaldi’s “Winter” for the first time. I was utterly destroyed; it struck me as the greatest mystery that any one thing could feel so full, so bursting with everything simultaneously. I listened and I cried and I felt the goosebumps raise and lower on my forearms and I sat paralyzed; listening and hearing and feeling ravaged into pieces and simultaneously healed again and again and again. And so it is with all great pieces of music that we are diminished to our smallest parts one moment and able to grasp in the next the naked truth of our greatest potential.

As we age, we lose so much. We slowly establish walls so that the world can no longer hurt us. We barricade ourselves in and stick to the safest, most predictable routes. We fall into stride with the same friendships and hide from the potential of new ones. It is all, of course, in an attempt to avoid pain. To live courageously requires us to die a thousand small deaths. For most of us, disappointment and pain and failure are accompanied by another inch or two of space from vulnerability, from the raw state in which we all enter this world.

Sometimes still, when all the walls are crashing in and my deepest anchors have come unmoored, I will sit in my car, tears streaming down my face, and blast “Claire de Lune” until I am, again, beneath that Steinway. I am 22 and it is you and me and Debussy and an empty auditorium. You play like it is the only time anyone has given the song voice and I listen as though it is the last time it will be heard.  I close my eyes and let the music pour over me in waves, concurrently battered into my smallest parts and rebuilt again and again and again.

Tired

There are so many ways to be tired.

There is, of course, the ten miles into a run and can’t manage another step kind. And the I’ve been up with a baby all night exhaustion. There is the starving and haven’t had a bite since morning weariness and the moving into a new house and can’t lift another box sleepiness.

And then there are the more pernicious kinds, the variety that stir in the deepest places and send tendrils into every inch and crevasse of the body.

There is the emptiness of missing weeks and weeks of my children’s lives. The hollowness of being absent at yet another bedtime, of hearing details of but not bearing witness to the living room dance party, of not being the last person to give a kiss before the blessed peace of sleep arrives.

There is the desperate, neverending missing of those who are essential to my very soul existing in worlds so very far from mine. The empty knowing that this is the way of the modern world and the nagging sense that, somehow, it is all so wrong. The knowledge that love can travel limitless distances, but the reality that the daily absence of you is just so very, very full.

The daily trickle of the news that threatens to drown me and the sense that I am simply a bystander to the madness. The pervasive thought that I should have more power, that I should have more leverage, but that, somehow, the ability to harness it is just out of reach. The desperate notion that my children will grow up in an entirely different country, and the despair at knowing it may be a much, much more difficult place to live.

The wake, make toast, take the kids out, naptime, commute to work, commute home, sleep, and repeat nature of existence that threatens much more than boredom. The sense that these days, these endless and finite days, are being tossed away as though they are limitless. The wishing away of them and simultaneous desperate urge to hold on to every fleeting moment. The knowledge that I am not living them, but traipsing through them. That I am, somehow, a bystander to my own existence.

When a place that used to be home is unalterably changed and I find myself amongst strangers who used to be friends. The sense that my identity has shifted and with it, reality itself. The faith that roots I plant in shallow soil will somehow take hold and, over time, flourish and flower and thrive. The inescapable and seismic shift that is inevitable with change. The constant and repeated incantation that courage and persistence and faith have nearly always paid off and that there is always, always beauty in the things that feel most arduous and frightening. The prayer-on-repeat to be calm, be brave, it’ll be okay.

There is the ache for tiny, quiet moments with you. A house so very full of noise and chaos that when I do get a word in, it is about the litany of details we must coordinate and never about the infinite ways I have come to see and to love you. The numerous times throughout the day that I forget to say thank you or acknowledge the way a reassuring touch or gesture or kindness has sustained me. The sense that without you, the world would take on a dullness, a grey that would topple and destroy and shatter my very marrow.

I have felt so inexorably tired. And there are so many ways to be that have everything to do with the heart.