sound recognition

Tonight, after watching the movie Brave with my parents, brothers and our friend Thomas, I had the words and it breaks my heart on my mind.  I laid down on my bed and summoned Regina Spektor's Begin to Hope album to my iPhone.

I just listened.

I waited to feel the sting of the words and it breaks my heart, breaks my heart.  As I lay in wait, specific moments in my life were conjured up, stirred deep from adventures past.

The experience of my first discovery of Ms. Spektor's voice and words took me to lone evenings in my small stone-walled room in France.  So many nights I sat on my bed listening to that album as I recapped the day's adventure in a new land or waited to call home with the bubbling sound of skype ringing into the family computer back in Indiana.

I recalled long nights in the studio ending with with my tired eyes glancing up at the morning sun breaking the distant hillside, pushing fog down the valley.  The words are a soundtrack traversing the hillsides of Provence, the streets and museums of Barcelona and Paris.  I recall specific moments of walking through a textile museum in Lyon and the green of a tapestry with it stitches to intrigue me with their texture.

It has been five years.

Yet, all these experiences are just below the surface of my memory.

This evening I sat discussing To Kill a Mockingbird with a younger cousin - it was as though I had read it just last week.  Specific words and mental imagery bobbed quickly up.

In the car later, the Romantic period of art came into a conversation with Samuel and Zachary.  The deep meaning of Vincent van Gogh's post-Impressionism and the profound impact it would have buzzed out of my mouth.  Images and moments of listening to lecture after lecture from my 25 credit hours of art history classes whizzed around my mind like ghosts. In the memory of a specific piece recalls the blue carpet of the classroom, the way the chairs squished a bit as I leaned back into them, my classmates with laptops, the tree's standing guard outside the classroom windows, the professor's pronunciation of terminology, my frustration from not being able to retain fact after fact - the dates, the names, the images.

Yet all the memories of my past don't make up or mask the searing burn as I sit letting the lyrics sink deep.  It still breaks my heart.  The prickly tightness hits my throat as I think about your departure on Monday.  I'll try to breathe and find distraction in my day-to-day.  I'll think of the beautiful moments we have yet to share.