Melodic Memories

I stepped off the school bus and into the chilly December air. Shivering, I trudged up the driveway, the loose gravel crunching beneath my feet. As I opened the front door, I was greeted with a preternatural silence that stopped me in my tracks. Listening for a moment, I entered the house and crept into the kitchen. There, I saw my parents silently slumped over steaming mugs of tea at the table. My father raised his head and gave me a weak smile, while my mother did not move. I was only eleven, but I was smart enough to know: someone had died.

A family friend that my parents met through their dancing class, had passed away during an unfortunate accident. She was backing out of her driveway at the top of a steep hill and stopped to get out of the car. Her car rolled down the hill and pinned her against a tree where she was subsequently crushed.

She was a young, exuberant woman who was newly married and often brought my family on new and exciting adventures. She and her husband introduced us to Renaissance Faires, which we quickly fell in love with and have purchased many expensive outfits for since. They also brought us camping, even though my mother always hated it. It rained the first night and I'm doubtful it changed my mother's view on camping, but, on the staircase wall, there still rests a picture of me sitting on the now-past woman's lap that sunny July day. My hair was frizzy from the humidity, and my mother may have been sullen from the rain the night before, but I still sat there with a gap-toothed smile.

As a child, I had few friends and often turned to my parents and their friends for companionship. I was more than content to spend time with the adults at parties, like the woman who passed away. Her kindness and extroverted nature were also infectious; it was hard not to love her.

Despite her passing, I begged to go to the school dance that night. Though my parents yielded and drove me, I sat in a ball of emotions on the cold checkered blue tiles of the cafeteria floor while pink, blue, and green lights beat in rhythm across my face.

At home that night, my parents huddled over my mother's laptop to share pictures and memories with the friends and family of the lost loved one. Though this group was friends previously, it seemed they were wrapping their arms around one another in familial solace, and I wanted to be part of it.

I joined Facebook that day to mourn with them, though that quickly faded. Young and impressionable, I soon became immersed and consumed with the quizzes and games on Facebook instead of the group of mourners I went there for.

On a Saturday in high school many years later, I saw the quiz "What song perfectly describes your life?" The excitement in me was palpable as I thought the words over before beginning the quiz.

After many forgettable questions, I received the result "Breath (2 AM)" by Anna Nalick. I frowned and frantically Googled the song. It was a beautiful, solemn song that didn’t resonate with me until a particular verse:

2 AM and I'm still awake, writing a song

If I get it all down on paper, it's no longer inside of me

Threatening the life it belongs to

And I feel like I'm naked in front of the crowd

'Cause these words are my diary screaming out loud

And I know that you'll use them however you want to

Like the song, my writing always accompanied me and grew with me throughout my life, morphing to reflect what I was facing in life. Though a simple quiz and a seemingly random result, it felt like a deeper truth that spoke to my expression through writing and the blackened roots of depression that began to wind within me.

By that time, cynicism and distrust had begun to blossom in me. I traded my books in for loud, angry rock music that I used to drown out those around me on the school bus. I began to understand that the world - and the people in it - weren't good and that my naive, childlike inner self needed to be hidden and protected. Even with that knowledge in mind, there were still those that managed to slip through the cracks.

At the start of high school, an older boy on the bus saw through me and my tough exterior and made it his mission to get through. He told me that I was like an egg with a tough outer shell, but soft on the inside. I was both annoyed and amazed by his perception and knowledge. Little did I know, that was merely the beginning of his deception.

This boy became my first boyfriend, "A.” Like many first-time relationships, it was not a wise choice. "A" was four years older than me, as were my next two boyfriends, "B" and "C." It never worked out well for me, but it took some time, and three tries, for me to figure that out on my own. Whether due to being my first relationship, our age gap, or my childlike disposition, he was very manipulative and successfully so.

When I went out into the woods one night, like I often did, he texted me, frantic, telling me to get out of there. I stood up, panicked, from the log I had been resting on and asked what he meant. He told me there were angry and vengeful spirits all around me, that they were out to get me, and I was in danger. Remembering my uncle had found arrowheads in the backyard as a kid, I didn’t think twice and ran.

Nearly out, something tore at my arm. Thinking it was a thorn, I went back the next morning but couldn’t find any thorns or sharp branches in my path. “A,” told me that it was a spirit that scratched me while I was trying to get out.

Another night, I was pacing the maroon carpet of my parent's room, talking with him on the phone. I was irritated with him for a forgotten reason, and he claimed that I was causing his projector at home to short-circuit with my anger. Interested and amazed, I continued to feed into this. He told me I had elemental powers and I wanted to believe it, so I did.

The next day, I sat on a rock in the middle of the brook. Dipping my hands into the cool water, I imagined controlling fire while my hands were underwater. I was so interested and amazed that I sat out there until dark. Never fearing the woods until that point, I panicked and texted my dad to come to rescue me. The woods, the place that was my haven, disappeared under the weight of fear and manipulation. To this day, I don't venture near it at night, despite knowing better. His roots sunk deep.

I brought him into the woods the next day to confront his allegations of spirits, but he claimed that I was safe since I was with him. Finding no fault with his logic, we rested on a fallen tree at the edge of the trail, and he kissed me.

I fell off the back of the log after we kissed and he laughed, claiming he knew that would happen, that he had prophesied it through his drawings. He also said that he had drawn and prophesized about us having sex before as well. He was 19 and I was 15, not yet even considering that as an option yet nor wanting to.

Lying there, stunned, with leaves and twigs sticking out of my hair, “A” was standing over me, laughing. I was perplexed; the kiss wasn't magical, it wasn’t something great and awe-inspiring that had caused me to swoon. Even to this day, I cannot recall any feeling other than disappointment. I fell off that log out of sheer clumsiness and lack of balance, something I have been notorious for since second grade.

Like many couples, we had a song. Unlike many couples, he chose three. One was meant to describe how he felt before he met me, one for during, and one for if we ever were to break up, which we did eventually, but not because I came to my senses.

"A" and I ended up breaking up two months after we started dating. Sometime after that, he stood leering at my best friend in the middle of the town gas station, informing her that he broke up with me because he couldn't have sex with me. Unfortunately for him, she had a boyfriend and that was not the way to get in someone's pants.

The song he chose as our "together" song was "Chasing Cars" by Snow Patrol. I listened to it repeatedly upon our breakup, crying and cursing the world out for the fleeting romance. Since then, upon hearing the song while walking on the tan tiles and carpeted floors of retail stores, the emotions come flooding back to me; my mind reverting to the days spent crying in my room or staring blankly out of the school bus windows while blaring music.

I don't miss him, nor do I miss our weird, whirlwind "romance." Music had become another way of dealing with my emotions, and the repetition of a particular song made my emotions stick to them. Certain songs carry a sense of emotional remembrance that have nothing to do with the memory, but the pain and emotion felt at the time instead.

Unlike that song, "If I Die Young" by The Band Perry became a more distinctive, resonating song, as it served as a reminder of a lost loved one.

"If I Die Young" was practiced to my parent's discontent for numerous months during my voice lessons phase. Years later, two days after my birthday and four hours away, my cousin died. Others got to murmur their goodbyes and weird, but poignant, memories and phrases, but my last memory of her was two months earlier.

We sat on the black leather couch of her mother's living room, watching and commenting on the diving portion of the Olympics. She was pale and sunk into the cushions with the weight of her pain and lethargy. Her curly brown hair was now growing back white, and oxygen tubes snaked up her nose as she watched the screen listlessly.

It should have been no surprise when she finally succumbed to the cancer that had been eating away at her for years, but I never saw it coming. I, like the others, was under the delusion that she would get better again like the few months she had less than a year prior. Instead, we sat at the funeral, her casket wide open and surrounded by bouquets.

She was laid in her lace burgundy dress that she wore the past Christmas when she had a head full of newly grown hair and celebrations of remission still fresh on her tongue.

The priest droned on with false platitudes and devoted ramblings before he ventured off-script. The priest, the old man in white and gold robes that had most likely overseen her Christening, stopped and began to quote a song in an eerie, shaking voice:

If I die young, bury me in satin

Lay me down on a bed of roses

Sink me in the river at dawn

Send me away with the words of a love song

Lord, make me a rainbow, I'll shine down on my mother

She'll know I'm safe with you when she stands under my colors

Oh, and life ain't always what you think it ought to be, no

Ain't even gray, but she buries her baby

He continued with more vapid speech and prayer, but the whole family sat in stunned silence.

My cousin died at the age of 24, and her mother was burying her only baby. I can't sing or listen to that song anymore without feeling the cold on my lips as I kissed her forehead. Beside me that day, was my boyfriend, “D."

Senior year of high school, several years prior, I finally started to date someone younger than me - by precisely 22 days as I like to remind him. He was a shy, sullen boy that sat next to me in homeroom but had known me long before then.

Years earlier, when I was dating "A", I attended a local town celebration where a cover band my parents followed was playing. Though I was sad "A" wasn't with me, I had become accustomed to his absence.

As the band played behind us, my dad and I strode over to a small, makeshift stall selling light-up gizmos. My dad purchased two cheap lightsabers, and we returned to our spot on the picnic benches.

During a particularly loud song, instead of dancing, my mom and I got up and clashed lightsabers together, attempting to keep time to the music while laughing.

Shy as always, "D" slunk around the tent, his long, dyed-black hair obscuring his face, and watched with growing amusement. As a "Star Wars" fan having trouble in his own short, but violent and abusive, relationships, he appreciated it and had a crush on me from that moment on.

In homeroom years later, he recognized me, though we did not talk. I was dating yet another boy four years older than me, "C", but unconsciously liked and noticed "D" from the beginning, for reasons I still don't fully understand. When "C" broke up with me in November, "D," noticed, though he did not say a thing.

A week later, "D" came in with bright red hands and no gloves.

"What happened to your hands?" I practically yelled.

He jumped and stuffed them in the crooks of his arms, his thin leather jacket groaning. "I had to walk to school."

Huffing, I replied, "I'm bringing you gloves tomorrow."

He turned his head sharply, and I could see a look of incredulity on his face. I smiled a little inside, imagining his surprise the next morning.

The next morning, I followed up on my promise and brought in a pair of bright blue gloves. After two months of nurturing our friendship through playing Xbox together and talking, we began to go out.

One night, still relying on my parents for rides, they picked us up to go see the same band that was playing when "D" first saw me. He implored my parents to play "Tonight" by Seether and kept casting sidelong glances at me while I pretended not to notice. He brought out his phone, illuminating his face in the dark of the car, and texted me.

"Do you like this song?"

I responded, "Yes," and, surprisingly, I meant it.

In my last relationship, "C" gave me a CD of songs that reminded him of me. The songs were all in his favorite genre, one which he had incessantly tried to push on my mother and me to an annoying degree, and one he knew I didn't like.

"Tonight," however, was from a band I already knew and liked. It was even in my favorite genre.

Now, as I sit here writing this and smiling, I hope to dance to that song at our wedding one day, when the world and circumstances finally align, and we can begin our life together.