With my eyes closed and head tilted back against the top of my seat, under the dome of the Flandrau Planetarium, I remembered myself. I was sitting in the almost dark listening to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon in surround-sound with the laser light show flickering across my eyelids. Oh yes. This is me!
I am the one who lay on my waterbed in the basement of my mother’s house, listening to Dark Side of the Moon on my headphones with the stereo cranked up. The music became the foreground–I slipped inside it, like a record fits in its sleeve, safe. Safe from word barbs that scratch till blood shows. Safe from expectations to succeed without support. Safe from despair about my imperfect body. Safe from the future. Safe in the present. No pain here inside the music, no emptiness, only full rich sound, lullaby of loud. Sound healing on repeat. I lay there tonight with that same music. It was not an echo of the past, it was a repeat of a familiar present. I wanted to get up and dance, but it’s a seated experience. I patted my legs with my hands in rhythm to the music and lifted my feet up to tip-toe and down. I thought of my friends sitting beside me. I got them there. I got myself there. I thank myself for being my own planet: whole and inhabited, the opposite of extinct.
I am this wet instrument of fluids that transport gasses and nutrients to my solid industry. Fuck my mother and bullshit worries. I’m so me, it’s ridiculous.
Music did that. Go to the music. Feel it awaken the darkness and light, the verse and its verso. Life is seamless like a perfect album. No need to turn it over. It’s turning already, a sphere upon a sphere among the spheres. Thank you Pink.
(The image is of the moon phase on my birth day, month, year, care of Simple Moon Phase Calendar android app and widget.)
Right there with you, my friend. I hope you didn’t mind my singing along.
On the contrary, I felt like I had permission to sing, too, because you were!