Songs We Live In
6/27/2024
It's getting dark, and the Lithuanian sun is hiding behind the forests. I stop the car on the roadside and turn up the music. I never would have thought that I would fall in love with this song. And now I turn it up and am surprised that over the years I've learned a few verses.
There was a very strange village festival in Sri Lanka. The locals invited us to dance because only five of us were not from that area. The festival organizers went all out: food, drinks, and even a local DJ from somewhere. We danced in the street to the songs of local performers, which the musician occasionally mixed with global hits. My friend, with a local boy on his shoulders, laughingly sang Sting's "Desert Rose." A German in a Sri Lankan village, carrying a laughing child on his shoulders, singing about a desert flower with eyes closed and a smile. And now, in my car, that same song plays, completely out of place in the scenery. I don't see the red sunset in front of me. It has changed into him – smiling in memory and constantly turning towards me.
"Fly me to the moon," Sinatra sings to me as I wait by my boarding gate. I have heard all possible versions of this song. If I were 30 years younger, I would propose to you right now, he smiled before leaving for the airport. If you were 30 years younger, I would immediately say yes, I hugged him and watched his receding silhouette with my eyes. As soon as the chords of this song play – whether it is a local bar, a run-down café, or a luxurious concert – all those passing years stop. They never existed. There was only that long night at the airport and those thousands of boardings, through the windows of which this song told me about you.
I kissed all the club DJs just to play for us, the one and only song. We were teenagers, wild like dogs let off the leash. When I climbed up to the record spinner and demanded a "repeat," he bargained for another half hour without "that song" and, trying to charm me, dragged me to the bar. Two beers – I drunkenly mumbled, offended that things were not going my way, and, collecting the drinks, returned to my friend, who was winning the dance contest at the club. As dawn began to break and people started to leave, we realized we had been robbed. No documents, no wallets – nothing, only two DJs smoking in the doorway. When one of them drove us to the police station, I did not hesitate to ask him to play that one and only song along the way.
There was only a long, never-ending road and us. Silent, not knowing what to say to each other. We listened to his favorite songs because sooner or later they would become my favorites. The G chord of the guitar sounds. I feel us both freeze for a second. We were not mistaken. Only his hand rises to turn up the volume, and mine to switch the song. For him, it is a cozy memory. For me, it is an open wound. How I would like to place someone else among those lyrics. But no one fits. It's a pity. The song is too beautiful not to listen to.
I don't understand how those words stuck in our memory, even though we never learned them. It is probably the fault of our parents' parties because sooner or later, some "heated" lady would find her way to the music center and play a well-known hit. I think it is the only song we sing secretly from others. "You know what's wonderful about it," she once said, pressing a wine glass to her lips when the last chords played. "The whole song is about love, and the word 'love' was never used." Just like with us, I thought at that moment.
When people lose their memory, the most effective way to bring them back, even for a short time, is music. Hundreds of cases tell how an elderly person, no longer remembering their name or surname, sings a song from beginning to end when the right song plays. Sometimes, they smile while singing. Sometimes they cry. What emotion visits them probably depends on what person lives in those songs. Did they lose someone and never find them again? Or did they experience the most beautiful moment of their life with someone, and it remained between someone's written notes? Maybe those people will never leave through the songs. Maybe that is, indeed, the only way to keep them.
They say every person has their song. I would give up all my birthday presents to hear in which songs I live. I would like to know how I sound to someone when I am silent. How wonderful it would be to see if a person, hearing you, would want to listen again and again? Or maybe, upon hearing about us, they don't want to hear anything anymore? Is there a song that reminds a person of how you danced funnily? Or how you hummed the same melody coming back from the store, making it feel safe because you would soon enter through the door. Maybe you are in some songs, and that's why there is so much pain in them? Or maybe, in a certain song, you smiled so that someone drives those 10 kilometers and smiles along with you?
A year ago, I started collecting songs in which my people live. I guard that playlist like the greatest treasure because when our paths diverge, which happens too often, I can still be with each of them a little bit longer.
For those 3 or 5 minutes, I feel like that time did not exist. We are going together to buy me pants, and you are singing while holding my arm. Or we are rushing on a scooter to eat ice cream, and you are laughing that we will soon fall off. Those minutes, I feel that even if we are not talking, we are still together. So, in some strange ways, I try to write them all down in my memory. So that if it happens that I remember nothing, that song collection would be enough to remember more than my name and surname.
And if, while reading these words, you thought that we dream of the same things, I will leave you a hint.
Maybe you will recognize yourself.
And if you could choose – in which song would you like to live?