on melody and memory.

This morning, Pandora decided to play me a song that I hadn't heard in quite a while, a song that was part of a CD that I happened to purchase during a whiny and particularly crap period of my life. At the time I felt like hell, and while I wouldn't consider this album to be "emo" by any standards, I found it inspiring. I mean, whatever. We all have our moments, right?

The odd thing about this experience, though, was that the song made me smile. Not because I'm a different person now, or because I'm happier today than I was back then, or because it was one of my favorite songs at the time, regardless of ambient circumstance. No, this particular song made me smile precisely because it put me right back in that place. It was a romantic walk back through a bitterness that I can only now fully appreciate. Don't get me wrong - my smile had absolutely nothing to do with what I learned from my mistakes, or the clarity with which I can now reflect on the situation. It was simple, sweet nostalgia for my own overwhelming (and probably overblown) angst.

This has happened to me more times than I can count; a piece of music rolls through me, leaving swells of adversity in its wake, inevitably culminating in a kind of tragic happiness. And it got me thinking about the power of memory. I can only assume that my own troublesome feelings about the past lose their potency as a kind of self-preservation. So that the narrative remains fact, but the feelings become more like fiction, vague flashes of moments that I can rewrite and fill in on a whim.

Does this happen to anyone else? Maybe not. Is any of this rational? Maybe not. Maybe I'm a control freak who desperately needs to be in charge of her own history. Or maybe I'm just obsessed with the fullness of feeling. Either way, it's a response I wouldn't give up for the world.