Memoirs II

I once blogged about the power of the mind and the incredible, almost tangible picture that one can relive by fusing the mere memory of something with pictures and words.

Then I realised I had forgotten one major element in the recreation of this 'picture'.

Music.

There are a great many songs on my iTunes playlists that can transport me back to a certain scene and recreate that very picture right before my eyes, larger than life. And not just those labelled 'Our Song' or 'The Song That Reminds Me Of You' but random snippets of music where I can actually see, remember....and feel.

I revealed to a friend recently that BoyzIIMen's 'Four Seasons of Loneliness' will always remain one of my all time favourites. Simply because it has travelled with me through 5 years of my life and watched a great love turn into horrendously ugly drama and then settle back into an unbreakable bond of friendship.

This is the song that saw me through the days of 'Alyssa's Songs' on our iPods, the days of DJ-ing, of chatting in the dead of night till the sun rose, and more recently, of you being the selfless friend you were and comforting me in the most ironic of situations when I needed you most. And so it is that when I listen now... instead of the choked-back feelings and pent-up emotions that could not be expressed....I listen with an open heart, and smile back on the good, colourful moments of it all.

Then again, there are a great many things that can evoke the strangest and most irrational of emotions in one's mind, overruling the universal fact of mind over body. Because it is only human for your heart to react completely differently from the way you plan it to.

For a day or two, it was the blatant thought of having only yourself to rely on that struck in a place where the wound couldn't be seen. The emptiness of that gloved hand in the cold December rain. The purple umbrella and the swirl of events that came to play prior and latter to that. All these reignited this feeling of choking-back a zillion emotions, of choking back bile, and of that sheer emptiness somewhere within.

For a good 3 days, I avoided listening to 'Superhuman' on my player. The story of how I got to know of this song, how I came to love it, how we listened to it on repeat - this was a long story that I would easily have let to brew in the past. But age and experience have taught me to bottle up my thoughts and sweep them under a rug, and to not talk about them - or rather, to choose not to talk about them.

And so I decided point blank that there is a time to cease all silly obsessions. At the end of the day, when I have decided enough is enough and I will only shed this many tears for this man of the moment, because this is all it is worth, I realise it is easier achieved than I had deemed possible.

So I listened to the song for a good many times, determined to halt this phobia of songs which had the ability of planting an array of moments I had once deemed 'happy' before my very eyes. Happy moments which were no longer to be, and never to be.

And when I felt nothing, I took that step further. Stripping off all my sheets and finally changing them because I knew.....I knew that that wafting scent of Hugo Boss in my room was a mere phantom smell, and that there is a time to stop recreating memory as such in your head. Especially when these memories have been induced by a broken heart.

When the cloud has lifted and you see, you SEE clearly. There is a time to do what is right rather than what you would preferrably wallow in. What is meant to be or not meant to be. I may be a skeptic for now and will forever be guarded against further matters of the heart, but maybe....maybe one day I will believe again, and hopefully along the way I will cease to meet people who continuously obliterate all that is left of those few shreds of optimism within.