Earth Experiences #19: Music Magic

The world is my soundtrack

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Sisters Still

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Today was a Thursday that felt like a Friday. As I stood under the warm, relaxing spray of the shower tonight—spent from packing the rig and straining my brain to continue learning a new, complicated job—The Cure’s Pictures of You played on my Spotify list.

As soon as the opening chords began, I was transported to that afternoon at Trident in Boulder when I sat among the books, sipping coffee, trying to write, and crying silently as the lyrics, I’ve been looking so long at these pictures of you, that I almost believe that they’re real reverberated throughout the shop. Silent, shameful tears burned a path down my cheeks as the song ripped chunks of my heart into shreds. I’d traveled to Boulder alone, but I was supposed to be with my Pilates instructor, the woman I’d fallen madly, obsessively in love with. Everything felt raw and rough in that coffee shop—the weather, my words, all the tactile things that brushed against my skin, all the broken pieces of my outwardly enviable heteronormative life.

Although I’ve been to Boulder many times since then, I’ve never been brave enough to go back to Trident, the place where I fully understood my life would never be the same in so many different, fundamental ways.

There are times in my current existence when I can’t quite wrap my head around the incredibly intense feelings that accompanied my relationship with my Pilates instructor, with those painful, exhilarating, exasperating days that surrounded my coming out after 46 years of trying my damndest to be straight.

But Pictures of You always brings back the enormity of that time, the shine of her golden hair, the butter soft of her skin, the deep-buried knowledge that this relationship would never work, even though I would ultimately give up everything for the possibility and promise of that authentic life.

She is something to behold, elegant and bold; she is electricity running to my soul sung by Vance Joy does the same thing. I am back in my huge, empty Navigator, driving home from her house in the wee hours of the morning, rain falling on the windshield, tears clouding my eyes, not wanting to leave her, but knowing I can’t stay. The push and pull. The impossibility of it all.

Music is amazing that way. How years, decades, lifetimes can pass, and you’re still there, in that seminal moment, the second a remembered song begins.

My former husband used to tell me that “the world was not my soundtrack” because I sang my way through life. I have more song lyrics stuck permanently in my head than anything else. If it’s a song from the 70s or 80s in most any genre, chances are I can sing it from beginning to end. I feel strongly that I may not be able to remember my own name on my deathbed, but I’ll be able to belt out Marty Balin’s Hearts or Dusty Springfield’s Son of a Preacher Man with my final breaths.

One of my favorite party tricks is singing Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start the Fire without skipping a beat or missing a lyric. Memorized in the 80s, it’s a permanent part of me now. More so, even, than my current zip code or any of my thousands of passwords.

So, yes, I fundamentally disagree with my former husband. The world is my soundtrack. Every important moment in my life—and in the lives of so many of us—can be connected to song. For me, they range from belting Helen Reddy’s I Am Woman in the kitchen with my mom to rocking Baby Sam in the middle of the night, bleary-eyed, whisper-singing The Things We’ve Handed Down into his bunny soft ears.

Recently, an emerging publication sought 500-words or fewer essays written with the theme of “Still.” The first and only thing that came to mind was The Commodores and their 1979 hit. It wasn’t necessarily my most powerful or well-crafted essay, but the following short piece emerged quickly as the music played on repeat in my head.

I’m so grateful all the precious pieces of and people in my life are connected by an unbroken chain of song.

~ ~ ~

Terzetto

Although I didn’t fully understand the nuance of the lyrics, the melody haunted me. I placed the needle precisely on the outer edge of that black disc many times a day, the scratch of my mom’s Victrola blending with Lionel Ritchie’s silky smooth voice. I was only nine, but The Commodores song, Still, made me feel things my young heart did not recognize.

It was the line, I do love you… still… and the mid-song dramatic crescendo into the bridge that gave me full body goosebumps. I would sing my duet with Lionel into my hairbrush microphone again and again until my big sister, Carrie, six years my senior, yanked the needle off the record and said, “Give it a rest, Katrina. I’m trying to read.” If I had a green apple Jolly Rancher stick nearby—one that I’d sucked into a sharp point—I’d jab her with it in response. But she’d just roll her eyes, slap my hand away, and lose herself again in a dog-eared copy of Flowers in the Attic.

Nearly five decades later, after going through a brutal coming out and divorce, I fully understand the lovers’ journey depicted in the song. The loss, the longing, the regret, the pain that lingers, the unspoken understanding, the love that never goes away.

But for me, it’s not a lover’s song.

It’s a song for my sister.

Because at age 58, Carrie got out of the bed she’d shared with her husband for 30 years and couldn’t find the way to her own bathroom. Glioblastoma took hold and didn’t let go. I sat with her under the bright lights of the rehab center after surgery, her head stitched together in Frankenstein-like fashion, her neck a palette of dark purples and blues, and we laughed hysterically at her inability to speak the words she could no longer find.

Laughing is always better than crying.

“Dammit!” she would yell as she racked her damaged brain, frustrated every time she couldn’t remember the words for “fried chicken” or “granddaughter” or “lampshade.” But she never stopped smiling, her left dimple a deep, dark cavern that matched her eyes. Her brown to my blue; her dark hair to my strawberry blonde. We were different in almost all the ways, but we were sisters, bound and true.

Four months later, she was gone. “I love you,” were the last words she would ever say to me, and she remembered all three of them in the right order. Carrie died only one year after our beloved mother left us here on this earth together, our original family trio whittled down to two. Now, without Carrie or Mom, I am here alone with Lionel Ritchie’s words echoing in my ears, and no one to sing to but myself. For however many years I must live on this planet without my beautiful mom and my only sister, I will love them.

Still.