Thursday, October 22, 2009

Fall, Fell, Fallen, Falling

It's easy to forget a past emotional state. When your heart hurts so bad you wonder if you might actually have broken your breastbone or fractured a rib, who wants to recall the nitty-gritty details of how the hurt really felt?
Songs have a way of bringing those states back to us, I think--whether we want to be reminded or not. A couple of nights ago I was sitting in the kitchen of the man who loves me when he began playing Lucinda Williams' album Little Honey. I listened to this album everyday last October (in fact, I blogged about one of the songs here-- http://hisbigfatindianwedding.blogspot.com/2008/10/taxman.html when I was doing a writer's residency at the Virginia Center of the Creative Arts. And if you had asked me recently to recall how I was doing during that month on the slow trajectory of divorce recovery, I would have said,"Oh, I was pretty much over it. I was concentrating on my work... blah, blah." But hearing those songs again this October while sharing the kitchen table of the man I love, I saw the night and day of these 2 Octobers.
Which says something about memory and trauma and music. And love.
And I think it might say something about writing, too--how to get at what it was we were really feeling in a past moment.
Anyhow. If wishes were horses, I'd have...an empty pasture right now. There isn't anything I am really, really aching for.

2 comments:

Elizabeth said...

I read somewhere or maybe someone told me that a heart that has been "broken" actually looks different physiologically. It makes sense.

Stacey J. Warner said...

Hi, just found you glad I did. Music brings up emotion faster than anything. That is why I do not play music when I teach yoga. It easily transports you to another time and place, sometimes not so good.

I'm happy to hear you are sitting at a table with a man you love.

Congrats on your essay being published. How do you manage your three blogs?

Please stop by the respite sometime...I think you'll like it and if you feel inclined please, follow along...

much love