Vagus nerve memory

 

As I've said, 2025 = TOUGH. 

But I found myself today with a little more time to breathe. Having needed a mood booster lately, I decided to stimulate my vagus nerve by playing and singing a song on the guitar. I started out with The Radio Dept.'s "Against The Tide", which doesn't sound like it when it's just me performing it but is a rich sensory experience when I hear it on my head while singing along. 

I don't know why, but the next song I chose was "Perfect" by True Faith. When I sing someone else's song I don't really add my own spin to it - - I'm always hearing it in my head and so I end up emulating the singer's style. Something about Medwin Marfil's voice is just so life-affirming: full-bodied yet mellifluous, so skilled and if it had a personality, it had the guts to take on any note. I could feel my batteries charging. 

I remembered that it was one of the songs I performed when I did a solo set at Route 196: Stripped, and an idol happened to be there at the time and loved that I covered it. Heehee good memory. 

I love to tell anyone who asks that what this song, or True Faith's music in general, did for me was allow me to fall in love with major 7th chords. But what made me instantly fall in love with "Perfect" in particular was when I heard the words, But just like Mathis singing / on a low down Sunday afternoon / the blues split apart / all my sense departs / as I see you come into view.

I was in my high school dorm room, listening to the radio, and my ears pricked because it exactly conjured memories of Sunday afternoons with my Mom listening to her oldies station on her transistor radio. Dad had died, and their business was failing, so we were all depressed. But her Sunday afternoon music sessions were a reprieve from all that.

Since U was born, I've been remembering all my traumas, but now I feel like I'm in the last stages of reckoning with them. It's been exhausting. I've felt wrung out and many times have wished for an ending. But in moments like this, when music is involved, even on such a private level, I can look back on certain memories and feel joy - - and it makes me hopeful for the future.

I don't know whether my future holds making music anymore. But that's okay. Music is in my life somehow, and that's enough. It's a love language between me and R, and now also U. I will always have it to guide me to connection with them and I must always remember this. I can be brave enough to face our future if I have it in my pocket.

And I can be brave enough to face my past and continue loving the people who've loved me all my life, as long as I can use it as a conduit to them.