What Music Knows

There's a song that knows more about your life than your therapist. You know the one. It came on in the car during the year you were falling apart and it said the thing you couldn't say in the exact key your sadness was tuned to. Now you can't hear it without becoming twenty-three again, sitting in the parking lot of your old apartment, engine off, lights off, listening all the way through because going inside meant the silence and the silence meant thinking and thinking was the enemy that year. Music holds time the way photographs can't. A photo shows you what you looked like. A song shows you what you felt like. And feeling is the more honest record. My father played guitar badly and it was the best sound in the house. Not because of the music but because of the trying— his fingers on the frets like a man reading Braille in a language he almost understands. I have a playlist for every version of myself— the angry one, the hopeful one, the one who drove too fast with the windows down because speed and volume were the only medicines that didn't require a prescription. Music doesn't fix anything. It just proves you're not the first person to feel this way. And sometimes that's the only medicine that works.