Red House Painters

So, you're cleaning, and you dig up an old box of CDs or tapes (or sure, records, if you were into vinyl), and there are all these titles you remember but you haven't seen in ten, twelve years, easy.  "Man, I loved this band!" you think, and you pull out a handful of gems.  It feels like running into friends by accident, you're about to sit down and have a drink with someone you cared about deeply who just hasn't been in your life for a time.  The feelings are all there, just buried under all the careless accumulation of being alive today and now.

Then you press play, slide in the disc, rest the needle in the groove.  But it isn't a casual catch-up drink with old friends.  Your body becomes transparent because you cease to be in the now, your whole self is shoved unceremoniously into the past, frozen there while the songs play.  Maybe you are suddenly 25, and you've been swallowing all your disappointments, and you might not be entirely happy with who you are becoming.  You've been sending out distress signals that are too subtle for most people to understand.  You don't know how to make anything change, you don't know you are the one in control.

In the midst of that someone begins to entertain you - and it feels like it's for you, like a magician who is right there at your table, maybe other people can see the act but you are the audience for this fantastic sleight-of-hand.  This entertainment is a distraction and a summons and a fiction and a delight.  You are enthralled.

You are also taken in.  Because it is not for you - even the tricks and asides that only you catch aren't for you, those bits are really just the rehearsal of material for others.  You are not the audience but an audience.  It takes you a long time to accept that this magic isn't directed at you, isn't in response to you.  It takes you a long time to accept that nothing about you called any of this magic forth, that you were just the one sitting at the table when it started.  You wanted so much to be someone who inspired magic.

And when you finally realize what you are not in this situation, your disappointment wells up and breaks open over everything, it spills down into a few songs that you have to stop listening to, some CDs that you pack away in a box, and try to forget.

"The worst thing: to give yourself away in exchange for not enough love."  - Joyce Carol Oates