Songs For Your Day

Everything in it’s Right Place by amsettineri

Would anyone agree that it’s possible to love a song for a long time without realizing how much you really really love it?  What I mean is, certain songs are always gonna be great; you’re gonna love them from the get-go.  But not until the moment when everything is just right–the sunshine, the landscape, the levels of contentment and longing at a certain balance in your heart–will you realize that a song has a meaning for you which exists only ever internally; which can never be described to anyone else; a meaning in a moment which is rarely, if ever, duplicated.

The first time this happened to me was the summer of 2006.  My girlfriend at the time and I decided to get out of Boulder, CO for a little while.  Things were getting tense between us, building up to the moment only a month later when it would all end.  We drove to Canyondlands National Park in Utah and made love on the cliffside in the wind and unadulterated sun of the early morning.  The sky was flawless and blue and the heat of the rocks calmed our hearts.  As we drove around the park we listened to Modest Mouse and the song “Ocean Breathes Salty” came on.  The roads curved sending us floating into each other and we were in worry-less love again for those three minutes and forty-nine seconds.  I never wanted to leave that moment.  But if there’s anything that good music teaches us, it’s that pure moments don’t, and shouldn’t, last forever.

The second time a song revealed itself to me (or revealed me to myself?) was just two days ago.  The week before on the ranch had been wet and cold and snowy.  We worked hard and had fun, but we missed the sunshine.  One of the new ranch trucks has a cd player, so I burned myself a little mix to listen to as I drove from project to project, from shop to barn to garage, along the river in the valley between the mountains, waiting for the sun to peek from the clouds.  I’ve never been happier than when I’ve been in Wyoming, and the land and the work help me forget about the few sad things I’ve known in this admittedly wonderful life I’ve been allowed to have.  As I was driving on the rocky road between my cabin and the main hayfields, the song “Catherine” by This Story played.  Every time I hear it I tell people that I know the singer, and normally that’s literally the only thought I have, that I know the singer.  But for some reason when I listened to the song on Wednesday it struck me that this is the closest I’ve come to her voice in a year.  That maybe this is all I have left of her voice.  It made me reconsider how little we sometimes know about each other.  How we can never fully understand another person, that our emotions are forever caged inside our bodies, no matter how we try to set them free to travel the open air between us.  I don’t regret anything that happened between her and I.  I only regret that what we had left had to end.

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