The Power of Music

There's just something about music that speaks volumes of a person's heart. It can breeze through your soul like a summer breeze that warms you down to the core, or it can blow through like a winter's chill, icing over your soul. Each song that comes on the radio or over my iPod lately seems to do one of the two or sometimes, both.

The other day, driving down the road, I was listening to an instrumental music playlist and B's former ringtone song started playing. It is NOT an instrumental song and I have no idea how it got into that playlist. The blood in my veins turned to ice, my heart stopped and I felt like I was suffocating. But my physical and emotional reaction to the memories of that song....well, it hurt, it pushed me right over the edge. And while it's kind of a joke now that I cry at the drop of a hat, the tears came anyway. That's the reaction of me to music, not even two bars into the song and I was in full-on panic mode and reached over to the fast forward button as quickly as possible.

Today, Listening to Jon Foreman, "The Cure for the Pain" came on and drove me right back to four years ago when I would drive around Lynchburg and sob over other heartaches and loneliness and unmentionable pains. "I've spent ten years trying to sing away the pain but the water keeps on falling from my eyes" - that was me on the brink of depression or diving right into it, I'll never really know. But I do know that listening to that song was like being transported to a place when pain and sorrow was so familiar, I could taste it all over again...and heaped on to what I'm already feeling.

Maybe in a few years, other songs will wash over me like that...but right now, there isn't a song that isn't plucking my deep and hidden heart strings. Each one that plays has a significant tug on me. Whether it's a Muse song or a new Christina Perri or just whatever...they're all pulling and pushing at my heart like the moon to the tides.

Each boy who's left me shipwrecked emotionally has at least one song that is associated with them...but this time...there's a library of music that won't let me escape. I sure hope that lessens over time, but I'm fairly certain that U2, Muse, Keith Urban, Ingrid Michaelson, Yo Yo Ma, Hans Zimmer, The Plain White T's, The Script, and a plethora of others will never ring the same way to my heart's ears ever again. In fact, I'm not sure I can ever listen to the Keith Urban, Plain White T's or the Script songs on my iTunes playlist again. Yeah, it's that bad. Sad, but true.

It's a powerful thing, music. It sings for me, but it also sings to me of pain, sorrow and emptiness that was - a mere few months ago - the epitome of hope, light and happiness.

And with that, I have to close with The Cure for the Pain because...it's my heart's theme song all over again.

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